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WK31
Mar 18, 2022 15:13:39 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Mar 18, 2022 15:13:39 GMT
Here's my favorite Shakespearian excerpt:
This fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest.
For me, The Bard's work is only potent in very small doses. It's easy to OD. (Same for the Bible.) Happily, Ludrum offers snippets. Fiction that educates is also a plus for me. And I did learn a thing or two from this weird, different, not-so-little Play in Time sci-fi. Although, for me, the science element was lacking. Like even if we could somehow impossibly propel an object to lightspeed, it'd take lifetimes just to leave this tiny galaxy. And throwing around wormholes and quantum thisses and thats doesn't really fix it for me. But the poetic/historical/fantasy aspect forgives its science. And, really, "science" has shot itself in the foot enough times over the past couple years so as to almost embarrass the genre anyway.
Plus there's a pretty good sex scene.
So, despite its want of believability, I'm sending it up. Sorry Terminal brethren. I know how busy you are. And writing, of all art forms, demands the most of its audience both in time and attention. I plowed through the 8800 words without ever really skimming, which is kind of a rarity for me nowadays. But don't feel you have to.
Technically, it's well above average. Only saw a few minor things:
She and Danielle went to a second performance As You Like It two days after she saw Edmund at the coffee bar.
missing "of"?
near-by
nearby
We didn’t bathe as frequently as your do now.
you
She wondered how many time he had used one.
times
Probably a few more, but I wasn't really in edit mode.
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WK31
Mar 18, 2022 23:20:35 GMT
Post by deplancher on Mar 18, 2022 23:20:35 GMT
[DeP's sitting crosslegged in the corner near the blue light spot which is not turned on probably either because the electricity has been cut off or she has watched too many reruns of Better Call Saul and wishes for the moment to bask in semi darkness. Mostly, she is shivering in the aftermath of reading the latest cap assigned to her by the Flying Blue Master.]
Être sûr, I am not fearful of death. Is it not merely one more journey along the way to... well, wherever it is each of us is marching to with purpose?
So don't mistake my temporary fragility, this layering on of ridiculous old mama dresses, natty sweaters, and coats, for fear, folks and frequent freakout seekers. I. Am. Not.
Maybe I should not leave my radio on all night. There are sometimes these plays murmuring in the darkness. Such odd and sinister aspects of the human existence they sometimes expound upon. Such moaning and screaming and experimentation. It's very low, this volume. For the sake of subliminality, you know? Est-ce un mot? Anyway, it's very low. Sometimes I learn things. Simultaneous dream and study, est-ce que tu comprends? Some things are better left unlearned though. Where is the boundary, hmmm? Is there one?
Let me be awhile. Bring me some lemon and ginger tea or something. I am contemplating this cap. I take my time. You wait. If time passing tick tock is too much to bear, take your leave. Do not hesitate.
[She leans over the crisp pages strewn around the floor of The Floor, picks one from the pile and leans back into a lumpy cache of pale blue pillows left from a piece of furniture long ago eliminated from the scene.]
Is everything around me blue today?
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WK31
Mar 24, 2022 8:34:12 GMT
Post by deplancher on Mar 24, 2022 8:34:12 GMT
[DeP's reading a book she found in the gutter today. The cover's been ripped off and the title and author's name blacked out. Who does that? she wonders but not for too long. The book is good, or she thinks it is. Anyway, she's reading it and chewing on some toffee from the corner store. The store is the only one in the neighbourhood that still looks like a corner store. It might not even be real but she likes it and when she throws on her cloak and boots and ventures out that's often where she goes. The toffee is hard. She might lose a few teeth. But it's sweet, oh so sweet.]
So I read through that cap Ted tossed my way last week. It's the first I've read for awhile, being unreliable and off wandering too often the dark streets chasing the moon and all that.
The first thing I noticed was hey, somebody knows how to present themselves. This cat CARES about his work, every aspect of it. It even smelled good! At least until we got to those final few pages it did.
I mean, I know it's the content any editor looks for but man I will openly declare those caps that arrive single spaced in an obscure 8 point font wrought with run on sentences and misplaced modifiers and inconsistent character names and spelling errors and typos and not justified and missing a paragraph? Yeah, they hurt my eyes. They prejudice me against the content no matter how I try to overlook it.
Okay, the content. That's the key, always. Always. This VC knows how to pace. A little repetitious here and there----I mean we know he's soulless from the beginning, right? A mourner for hire? But we want to see what unfolds. VC knows how to snag a reader's interest, how to transition. And we're asking, what's going on here? Something strange. Not your usual gig.
I hesitated. JohnVC is a Writer. I finished the piece which is to his credit. None of us here has the patience unless we're into it. Unless we're going somewhere, it's going somewhere.
I hesitated because I kept asking why would the protag not bolt? Should it be harder, more of a struggle for him to be convinced? I mean, even though he's a greedy slick, the task he's asked to perform here is...let's just say beyond reasonable. But he complies with each weird request. He climbs into those overalls. He carries the pail of acid. He ultimately complies with all of it.
Maybe that's the thing that intrigues us the most, finally. His willingness. His compliance. Maybe it's just on the edge of alarm and we're supposed to feel that tipping. That possibility.
Or maybe that's the failure. Je ne sais pas. More astute minds than this one will decide.
Bonne chance! I bid JohnVC after sending a notification with errors of my own lingering said note. You write, then you edit, then you press send, then you read and realize too late. This is but one of the perils of the 21st century. We ought send letters, meticulously composed and folded, slipped into linen envelopes and adorned with custom stamps. Walked with pure intent to the post in sunshine. We would accept only three submissions over a year. This could last forever. We would all grow old and terminate before the VCs received a response. But it would be a keeper. A letter of acceptance or non, in longhand. Museum worthy.
Freedom! barked a drunken trucker on his way to some mall. It's all oddness and starving intellects out there. A well formatted cap is something to savour.
Now I am climbing into my hammock with this coverless book and a sip of cointreau. I don't know what the book's about. All the pages I read earlier have been wiped clean. They're blank. Still, I am impelled to read on and fall deeper into a plot I'll have no memory of tomorrow morning.
This is either reality or a dream. That sound was me singing; it wasn't a scream.
If Doomey were here, I'd ask him to turn on some Arcade Fire.🦄
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WK31
Mar 25, 2022 16:50:36 GMT
Post by deplancher on Mar 25, 2022 16:50:36 GMT
[DeP looks up from her book of increasingly blank pages. There's a shape slipping through the sliver of the slightly open barely attached to its hinges door to The Floor.]
Allo? Are you lost or just thin?
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WK31
Mar 25, 2022 19:21:56 GMT
Post by rorschalk on Mar 25, 2022 19:21:56 GMT
Ahoy. Mademoiselle Deplancher, It's is only me, the ghost of the Ides of March come to commune with the long lost and fragmentary Bukowski.The other day I called Slavens. I expressed my everlasting fealty and we mended some partially burned bridges, but, alas, it appears Doomey has left the building.
[the Rorschalk limps toward the lacquered mahogany wardrobe and slips within the thin gap betwixt the parted doors, dragging his chain behind him like a train of long dead albatrosses]
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WK31
Mar 27, 2022 12:35:12 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Mar 27, 2022 12:35:12 GMT
Abed I close my book before I close my eyes. Ms. Rocks, however, will continue reading even after she has begun to snore. Sometimes her book will fall between us, lie splayed on her chest or across her face (therefore she won't read hardcover), other times balanced still open to her. I've learned not to ask if she's finished reading (hinting that she turn off her light). She isn't! This, she claims, is where she falls deepest into the story. From Dep's account of increasingly blank pages doomed to be forgotten, I see my wife is not alone in this approach. I think maybe I'll give it a try (might be as close as I come to writing again).
But I read Treiber's Pursuing Personhood sub in the usual, fully conscious way, and found it a credible piece of near-future, dystopian science fiction. It struck me as both realistic and cautionary, yet somehow metaphorical in the open-ended way that's always appealed to me. Roll your own meaning. For me, it asks, Do you want to go to heaven? To live (i.e., exist) in eternal connectedness and hopelessness, one with everything. Today virtual plots of land are selling for millions in the metaverse. So yes, we're almost there. But if I'm to join you, must I too become an imbecile and a genius, suffer your lame opinions, endure your corrections? Is individuality itself an illusion, without which there is only one vast loneliness? Is even this, what we imagine to be reality, not already a virtual construct. Are we not all connected to the same server? Or Is love more than just convoluted vanity?
This VC claims to "look forward to hearing what's fucked about it." Sadly, for me, not much. Maybe the sex scene. Or was sex intended to be reduced to masturbation in this realm of oneness? Also, I found the use of "as" as a conjunctive a little overworked at times. Employing "stated" vs. "said" in speech tags occasionally distracted. Might suggest avoiding them in favor of pairing spoken words with actions. E.g., Rocks picks up his new cheapo electric and powers up the amp. "Where have all the groupies gone?"
A few minor, perhaps even dubious, nits:
her musical lesson
music
A quiz appeared to confirm information retention.
This can be read two ways ("appeared" = seemed is how I first took it).
I wondered what was worse, this or loosing myself to the collective.
losing
Let's see how it fares upstairs. It's worth a second opinion.
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WK31
Mar 28, 2022 14:35:05 GMT
Post by deplancher on Mar 28, 2022 14:35:05 GMT
I wrote a poem once. It went something like:
Blah blah blah
bite bite hate love
peace
Forgiveness, when you can
~~~
Living in the Past is a good tune turned up loud and howled, but philosophically not the path leading to healthful living. I miss stuff. Sometimes fall into ruminations. Those are dark times. I must then force a temporary headstand to rearrange things. Change is constant.
Best to gaze at stars. Look for the moon. Wonder why. Then walk on. Let it Be, which is another message from the Before, but perpetually worthy of mantra.
Sadness is good grass for inspiring melancholy poetry and song. These things are valid. We can't live there though, Ted. It's all Desolation Row. The shops are all closed. All the peoples whose presence we long for have died or run away like a wingless flock of seagulls with sprayed on hair doodles.
We who must remain...oh - the feeling goes. Or grows. Somebody comes. Somebody goes. We're all pretenders. Nobody ever really knows.🐶🦋
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WK31
Apr 1, 2022 20:33:54 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Apr 1, 2022 20:33:54 GMT
It isn't cool what I'm going to do here. (Doomey would probably bitch-slap me like Will Smith did Chris Rock, and then say something succinctly and unflatteringly critical.) But I'm going to post the first few sentences of this Dead Flowers cap.
Lawrence reached down with his left hand to scratch his belly. Turning his head to one side, he traced the pattern of her profile in the darkness, silhouetted in wan yellow light.
Is it just me, or does this read as if his belly identifies as female?
The streetlamp outside barely crept in through the curtains,
I get that it's light from the streetlamp creeping in, but I'm not sure it goes without saying.
Anyway, as a relationship piece, this fell short for me. The one-night stand whose name he can't really remember (and whom he, and not his belly, is stroking) occupies the first several pages, but then just rushes off to work, probably as eager to be shed of this rather dull character as he is of her. I don't personally think it's possible to have your heart seriously broken by someone you have, if not not raised children, then at least suffered through some of life's stages with. And so his tireless (and somewhat tiresome) mewling and over his lost Annie, with whom he'd barely cohabitated, struck me as a little pathetic.
In fairness to this wordsmith, it is a thoughtful piece, well paced and capably penned. Just, for me, not interesting. Too humorless maybe, with too much philosophizing and reminiscing and too little happening... except maybe right at the very end, where he belatedly remembers having semi-inadvertently shoved his beloved Annie into traffic. Hence the pining.
Jamming away on my new axe this morning, trying to find some awesome score to go with the 4 note bass melody my step-grandson learned online for Smoke on the Water, it occurred to me that we don't create anything, we only discover what already is. Same in writing. And the work of discovery is mostly sifting, which this piece needs more of.
God I wish I could lambast a submission with a few well chosen obscenities like Doomey, or couch my dissatisfaction in beautiful non sequitur and apropos poetry like Dep (love your ending (and beginning!) verse above) can. But here all I have is, no.
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WK31
Apr 3, 2022 1:34:29 GMT
Post by deplancher on Apr 3, 2022 1:34:29 GMT
We are, not one among us, ever creating anything original but merely discovering what already exists...is this not enlightenment, mon cher Roxifier?
Strum strum strum that reel axe of yours right now!
And remember: 'No [Non]' is neither Doomey nor I, it's true. But it is succinct. It is distinct. And it is you.
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WK31
Apr 4, 2022 13:19:02 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Apr 4, 2022 13:19:02 GMT
The need to rhyme, yes, I feel it all the time. It brings order to the chaos. And it is not a crime.
Could not poetry, like religion, be a mostly benign, sometimes beautiful, but also sometimes horrible, manifestation of neuroses?
I think you misunderstand my deeply philosophical ramblings. I did not employ the word "original." David existed in a slab of marble; Mickey did not create, but only discover (uncover), him.
I tend more to pluck than strum in extracting sounds from the universe's great cacophony. Decades old classical training still rears her head.
I do very much appreciate the attention, discourse and advice. Especially the attention. Indeed, I must learn to say 'No [Nein]' in fewer words.
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WK31
Apr 5, 2022 16:32:09 GMT
Post by deplancher on Apr 5, 2022 16:32:09 GMT
I withdraw to my rhythmic hammock. Erect a new sign for clarity: I am no advisor to anyone.
As you were, Rockefeller, or are. I am/We are mostly alone here shuffling across mirthless glass tiles between peeling paint and exposed seams of crumbling walls. Sometimes an attempt at connection succeeds, sometimes it sadly fails.
In these moments, glancing toward the now forlorn desk of the once caustic and loveable Doomey, I shrug. Whisper the breviloquent words of Gilda Radner/Emily Litella: Nevermind.😎
[Through the walls, an old familiar melody. Gimme Shelter. If I don't. It's just a shot away... DeP sways in her hammock, quietly scribbling a few lies and elephant wishes. Later, she will shred these, fold the scraps into butterflies and violets. After dark, pound out a rhythm on her djembe. Howl soft at the moon on the wane.]
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WK31
Apr 9, 2022 8:33:52 GMT
Post by deplancher on Apr 9, 2022 8:33:52 GMT
Well. It's been a lively week. My distractions hardly have time to draw me in as Ted keeps folding caps into paper airplanes and ill formed cranes and then sending them to this corner of The Floor I periodically occupy. This place needs a good sweeping. Keep the lights low; there's more than one good reason for it.
One Bent Copper is on my desk now. The avion en papier it flew in on is deceptively non descript. Bland. Colourless. Quite plain. It could fly past you unnoticed and unremarkable were you not an alert and discerning observer. All that bland is camouflage for what lurks inside once an innocent passenger steps over the threshold. Oui, once in, any moves to escape prove futile. You are gripped. You're an eyes-wide-open partner villain shuddering while riding upon the shoulder of a covert operator with impeccable precision but no soul. His name is Pretios. But even as you shudder at the cruelty of the acts Pretios is assigned and executes with neither question nor conscience, you willingly ride on, stretching your voyeuristic neck to peer into poorly lit alleys to see where his stealth steps take you next. Sick. And sinister, too.
I do not much like (brackets) in a cap. And my eyes regularly cool to caps presenting as single spaced. I am no particular fan of creeps and killer tales. I think I found one typo. Nothing much to warrant issuing demerits here though.
Quality exists in many forms, and my penchant for spontaneous headstands and trance inducing meditational drumming does not block a cap of shine, craft, and worth no matter how dark the content.
Is One Bent Copper one of these? Merde! I don't know. But I think so. I do think so.
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WK31
Apr 17, 2022 16:26:07 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Apr 17, 2022 16:26:07 GMT
I read Joseph's After the Wreck about a week ago. I could be, and probably am, wrong, but I think it's about a guy who comes upon the scene of a car crash, feels guilty for not having stopped, can't find mention of it online or through personal investigation, returns to it only to be hassled by some cop, goes about his mundane life never knowing what happened.
I definitely remember thinking that it was actually his own accident, that he was revisiting his own demise, which was why it was so important to him, and so hard to learn anything about. In my own personal million or two miles of driving I've come across my share of accidents. I remember once seeing an old VW Beetle on the 401 flattened by a crossover head-on. Nothing left but the rear engine compartment. Or passing through Virginia once on our way to Myrtle Beach. It'd snowed a little, nothing like in Ontario, barely enough to cover the center line on whatever interstate we were on. But probably because many drivers hadn't seen the white stuff before, a lot of cars were off in the ditch or spun out on the shoulder. One dumbass had crashed into a billboard standing so far out in a field, I doubt I could've driven to it if I'd tried. And I've never had any inclination to stop, or wondered as to the backstory, which is why I was pretty sure the POV character in this cap was a ghost. But then wasn't. The mystery, such as it was, was never resolved. Not for me anyway. The hook, such as it was, stayed set.
Technically, the prose is competent. I did make a few notes. Like there are a few "he thought" tags I found superfluous. Since it's written in the tight limited 3rd, the reader can assume all thoughts are this character's. But the (other) biggest problem, and the reason I'm going to crumple these 7,271 words into tight little balls and fire them, a thousand or so at a time, out the Porthole, is that there's far too much meandering from point A to point B. Here's the one example I noted:
He brought the bag of food and his drink back into the room, took a seat at the small utility table by the window, laid out his meal, and began to eat.
Thanks for wasting 2.69 seconds of my life.
PS Dear VC, I appreciate your being a sport and inviting us to "mock" your submission on the "Big Board" (Floor, actually), though it pains me a little to think of these thoughtful (and time consuming) reviews as mocking. Like Siri once said to me after I told it to "Fuck off!"
I was just trying to help.
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