Critique Thread:

[Anonymous No.10333520]

Old one reached bump limit. Post your work here. (Maybe) get feedback from others.

[Anonymous No.10333573]

There are two shapes. One is rigid and is taller than the rounder one. The images are fuzzy and monochrome. There is a subtle scream in the background, a human kettle, some place in the distance. There are six planes of view: one supine on the ground, one directly above that, one to the right, one to the left, and one in front. The other one is behind.
There is smoke. Two pillars; slim, sexy billows from suspended rolls of paper. The air is grey and glows out of humanly warmth. It is an industrial hearth, of the Vesta of New York. Two chairs, of burned-and-cut hickory, are facing each other in responsibility. There is a taste of umami, but something more too. There are two moons out tonight. One, a sickle, the other a pale face. But there aren’t any stars out tonight.
There is the sound of machines. Conveyor belts cut the room with gritty screams. An industrial-grade chimney is coughing in the night of hour under the burning sensations of whatever was being tossed in its guts of terracotta.

[Anonymous No.10333576]

Seine kleinen Augen gingen den Raum nach Veränderungen ab, entdeckten keine - alles war gleich, unverändert. Nichts, seit A.L. gestorben ist, die Ananas, die kann was, hatte sich verändert. Nichts: die Wand, der Spiegel, die Lampe - jedes Objekt war gleich geblieben, war nicht verändert worden. Selbst das entsetzliche Bild, alle hassten es, D.F.s Schatten lag auf ihm, hing noch immer an der Wand, unverändert. Er öffnete seinen Mund wieder. --Warum hängt das Bild da noch? um sieben Uhr achtunddreißig, so als würde er es nicht ahnen, als wüsste er es nicht, so als könnte er - D.F. drehte sich um - es sich nicht denken, dämlicher Vollidiot. Sein ganzes Gewicht, das von N.M., verlagerte sich auf ein Bein, das rechte. Kein Vögelchen zwitscherte um sieben Uhr achtunddreißig, doch das war ihm jetzt egal, es spielte keine Rolle mehr. Sein Lächeln verklebte, schmierig, blieb stecken, --Du weißt, wie teuer der Dreck war.
--Das ist es aber nicht wert, als würde er schmatzen, --Gestern Nacht jedenfalls bin ich gelandet.
--Wohnst du zuhause?
--Fürs Erste.

[Anonymous No.10333586]

In German: https://pastebin.com/XnzVkPYh

[Anonymous No.10333661]

[Anonymous No.10333665]

>>10333573
>one a sickle, the other a pale face
noice

[Anonymous No.10333738]

follow close the beat of time
with metronome, each tick incline
a rush behind the eye
so blink
it shrinks
and humankind arrives

[Anonymous No.10333747]

In an introspection, in a calm inspection of his own many negatives, Mercurius found his taste for jests to be the one that stood out the most. Next came his needless verbosity. With his nature being that of an inconsiderate man, he was severely unequipped to speak the necessary words at the necessary time in the necessary amounts. He acknowledged that fact.
In fact, he was doing it right now. The meaning of the deluge of letters he had just spouted out forth could easily be boiled down to the simple and meager four word sentence of "I talk too much." He was a wordsmith that refined the complicated and reforged the straightforward into the complex. That is how he preferred to percieve and present his thoughts. It was small wonder those environing him would consider him vexing.

[Anonymous No.10333750]

If you could build a bridge from my sense of security
to the face of the outdoors,
I would find you a magician
and make very limited eye contact
to stretch it out for a lifetime

With that kind of power
you could unravel
the fabric of my mind
and I
would be left helpless,
sucking toes

The more I map these islands
the less I enjoy
So please,
for me,
keep it light
while we hope from the shadows of skyscrapers

But if we need to add some extra weight
I don't think I'll mind

[Anonymous No.10333759]

>>10333747

>the meaning of the deluge of letters he had just spouted out forth could easily be boiled down

u thirsty?

[Anonymous No.10333772]

>>10333750
>very limited eye contact
You should make this more concise. It's awkwardly worded.
>sucking toes
I like this line. It's interesting to me. I wonder how it connects to the rest of the poem.

The last two lines seem to be an appropriate end. Not bad. You should consider titling it. I don't know if it will feel complete without one, or with only the first line as a title.

[Anonymous No.10333776]

Life is but a prolonged swim in some collective afterbirth
Being is repulsive and over-real, an ocean of organ taste.
To know and to be known, experience is a fluid exchanged mouth to mouth.
Foundering adrift admist our own broth we are listing and lapping,
Sensory sewage secreted and sampled, eyes shut and orifices full,
Sinking and swimming, gullets brimming with the unspeakable.
Sensation is itself a thing vulgar, to share in the stew, to taste you,
Gruesome goop, gruesome group, all I come to rue, naught to know but that undue,
A common yoke these unclean masses, choking, intolerable, and interminable,
Death ever adds to the soup, our world one big vaginal vichyssoise,
Gross.

[Anonymous No.10333824]

>>10333772

It's awkward because it switches from slightly poetic language into the language of speech with little warning. I can tell from your writing that quick changes of modus operandi are not your specialty.

>sucking toes
who's fabric of mind is pre-raveled? who is helpless? who makes very limited eye contact?

two possibilities include a young child or the mentally deranged. the speaker toys with both possibilities.

Just opened your post and it's no wonder you were drawn to that line. "Children Suckling".

You're an amazing writer btw. The only thing is that you rely way too heavily on metaphor which tells me that you have a difficult time communicating things simply. On purpose or not. Either way it has the effect of a sandwich with one too many slices of cheese. Practice a bit of efficiency and I think you'll develop a certain clarity of mind that might one day be Nobel. This is very good stuff.

[Anonymous No.10334467]

>>10333573
I enjoyed this. There are some pretty memorable bits there, but some of the sentences are a bit too descriptive. "industrial-grade chimney coughing... night of the hour. . . burning under . . . of whatever. . . in its. . ."

>>10333661
Is this your first paragraph in the work or no?

>>10333750
Shouldn't be a poem.

>>10333776
t. me as a 17 year old

[Anonymous No.10334538]

>>10334467

>shouldn't be a poem

elaborate

[Anonymous No.10334555]

>>10333573
I don't understand the point of writing these short prose fragments for critique threads.

[Anonymous No.10334881]

Thinking of submitting poetry to a literary magazine. What should I know before submitting to improve my chances of being published?

[Anonymous No.10334964]

Posting this from the last thread, I have made some small changes from the previous one. R8 pls

[Anonymous No.10334967]

>>10334964
WRONG ONE, THIS IS THE NEWER VERSION

[Anonymous No.10335267]

https://pastebin.com/MZsiZiSA
Please critique this.

[Anonymous No.10335436]

like sages
he made birchen roots
of my feet
but willow leaves
of his own

[Anonymous No.10335444]

>>10333520
A chill breeze has been kicked up to a stir. The autumnal trees begin to shake like chain-linked fences in the desperate grip of the starving. He that hungers now is one lone soul never meant to be, searching for that which he’s lost. A man so bridled by madness that submission determines his liberty. Reality heightens itself in his presence: faint drizzles become great squalls, mild gusts turn to beastly howls, and slight affection evolves into intense adoration. For him, the devil was everywhere, but his lunacy is so sensitive and shaken that he finds God at the first absence of pain and godliness at the first wisp of love.

[Anonymous No.10335482]

>>10334467
Yep, first paragraph

[Anonymous No.10335483]

>in the morning –or no, it was the afternoon, definitely the afternoon –Ronnie woke with a lurch that set the whole room rocking like a boat, and the dream, whatever it was, was gone before he could resuscitate it. Just as well, because he could feel the veins inflating in his neck with the frantic scramble of his heart –he’d been trying to escape something or somebody, dark twisting corridors and howling faces –and now, suddenly, he was awake in the apparent world, a fine sheen of sweat greasing his body and leaching into the sleeping bag that each day stank ever more powerfully of mold and ammonia and creeping decay. Beside him, breathing through her open mouth with a faint rattling snore, was Lydia, her arms stretched out as if she’d been crucified. The dark nipples were like knitted caps pulled over the white crowns of her breasts, and her breasts were like people, two slouching fat white people in caps having a conversation across the four-lane highway of her rib cage. A fine line of glistening dead black hair measured the distance from her navel to her bush. There was hair under her arms, hair on her legs, a faint stripe of it painted over her upper lip. She was sweating. Her eyelids trembled. He lay there contemplating her a minute, letting his heart climb back down from the ledge he’d left it on, feeling as if he’d been assembled from odd scraps during the night. His head throbbed. His stomach made a fist and relaxed it. He needed to find some toilet paper, fast.

[Anonymous No.10335635]

He held the candle close to her eye,momentarily held by the subtle reflections dancing in the iris from its gentle flickering. With an effort he pressed the button on his tape machine and started recording.

"September 12th,1903. Three days have we observed this marvelous find:the Princess Khui embalmed living eons ago,perfectly preserved,as if asleep with open eyes,or seemingly entranced. Her regalia matches the description we found in the outer tomb,and Professor Plumes notes corroborate the time period the excavation has unearthed,yet I stare not at a desiccated corpse,but a living woman in her early twenties, without blemish nor pulse. I can but speculate-" A tap of a heavy object on his shoulder paused his recollections. Turning,he stared down the barrels of a shotgun,jostling his glasses and amusing the gunman.
"Doc,"he said,"let the nigger be."
He switched off the recorder with an angry snap of his fist. "How dare you! This is a royal personage, heir to an ancient dynasty reaching beyond this millennium!" He would have continued, espousing her remarkable preservation and discovery,but the gunman was already bored. The barrels moved up from his chest to his face.
"Nigger's a nigger,Doc. Dressing one up like a Christmas tree don't change nothing. Whatever she us,she can keep a bit. Problem's out there." He tilted his head to the crudely barricaded window of the but. Odd shambling steps milled about just beyond the fence in the dark, the occasional moan and gurgle adding to the summer sussuration of crickets protesting the evening heat.
"Them THINGS are out there Doc. Don't rightly know what they are,don't likely care. Just wanna get away from them,ya hear? And you waxing poetical 'bout niggers don't help that none. Leaves me mighty unmoved,shall we say. " The Professor merely glared at the lunk,a chance companion that proved as chancy as the lurking horrors outside. A woman's cackle broke the tension between them. Over on the cot,the gunman's lady friend was getting her hand bound up in rough cloth,hiding a recent severe burn.Whether she was sister or lover or both was a subject the Professor refused to consider,but acknowledged their similar low tastes. She sighed,smiling impishly at her nurse tying off the bandages.

"Nuthin' moves you much,Filbert,lest it be cold cash or hard liquor. Why not go easy on the Doc? All that learnin' might be good for something. Even for you. That Queeny is a pert lil thing,and I can confess Doc taking a shine to her,can't you darlin'?" This last part was offered teasingly to the nurse,who would not dignify it with a response, but did glare sidelong at the seated Princess,masking a touch of jealousy. The Professor rose,and ignoring the shotgun,paced quietly to the window and peered into the night and its indistinct shapes just out of the porch light's reach. "We must get away,certainly. But how can we reach the truck unscathed?" The night held little promise,only shuffling dread.

(Continue?)

[Anonymous No.10335688]

Everyone I showed these too irl liked the second one more, usually citing a lack of description in the first as well as the giveaway title.

[Anonymous No.10335690]

>>10335688
fuck

>the post where I forgot to attach an image will get more (You)'s than my actual post

[Anonymous No.10335704]

Is there anything more to life than playing Cardi B on repeat and rapping along to the lyrics but the feeling of accidentally saying nigga ends up causing such concern, especially if somebody is listening, so then the rest of the century is spent shaking hands with people and passive-aggressively being polite to everybody you meet just so they don't unveil the dirt on you that once upon a time you sung along to Cardi B and actually accidentally said you would "cut a nigga off." I've only listened to it five times in my life but I've spent thousands of years shaking hands with people. Please understand.

[/u/teasingcoma No.10335833]

>>10335690
How'd get your start writing stuff like that? I've tried my hand at a similar vibe also. It's p hard to do for me. First one's best.

[Anonymous No.10335856]

>>10335833
The last time I posted them both here everyone liked the first one, I'm not sure why 4chan is the exception. Deliberate misuse of Kafkaesque might have more weight here.

>How'd get your start writing stuff like that?
I just force myself to use a dumb word or cliche. When I was younger in college I would always "dent my car" by picking a shitty word to use in each of my essays before writing them so as to not worry about perfectionism while working on them. I've since grown out of that retarded habit, but it's at least useful for shitposting.

[Anonymous No.10335868]

>>10333750

why do you people write trite shit like this?

do you even think this approaches good?

[Anonymous No.10335870]

>>10335856
Gotcha, Ididn't care for the Kafka part, but
>To this day, I still think about the day I saw a man eat a handful of beetles
has this genuinely romantic cadence that I love for the subject matter

[Anonymous No.10335894]

>>10335870
I ended the previous sentence on a word that rhymed with day, then wrote day-I twice, but once with a comma, then crashed into man-eat, which was supposed to chop up b(eat)les at the very end. Is that how you read it?

[Anonymous No.10336470]

>>10335894
Doesn't really feel like a crash, the a's make it feel kind of bouncy and playful at the end. The eat/beetle rhyme works, but it doesn't 'chop' anything up.

[Anonymous No.10336496]

>>10336470
Thanks. I guess I shouldn't say "chop."

[Anonymous No.10336501]

This is my last work, which I wrote some fifteen years ago. Hit me with your worst.

>The legend of stars
>Chapter 1
>Dungeon

>It was morning. Despite that, the sun wasn't shining. Maybe it was shining back on the surface, but there was no sun underground.
>Bright rays from a burning torch fell onto a young face of a man who was walking through the cave. The face was very pale. Dark hair flowed over the left eye, almost completely covering it, and on the right half of the head the hair was brushed to the side. The man's eyes were light green and of the same light green grassy color was his entire attitre, with the exceptions of black boots and black sleeves of a vest. On the back there was a scabbard attached with a sword's pommel, gleaming with silvery light, sticking out of it.
>Elvor, not without amazement, looked at the lamps fixed to the cave walls, once working, but now turned into useless glass husks hardly visible in the eternal darkness of a dungeon. Elvor had never heard of this planet having a sentient life, while those lamps were a clear evidence of it having one. Still, there were no other signs of sentient creatures which, along with the the silence and the darkness was creating a mysterious and eerie atmosphere. Elvor was walking forward, ready to meet any danger.
>Suddenly, after one of cave's turns, a wall stood on Elvor's way. A tall brick wall that was blocking the cave completely, as if growing into its wall. On the altitude of two and a half meters there was a window and there was not a single way to reach it. A dead end?

[Anonymous No.10336505]

>>10336501
cont.

>No, this still wasn't a dead end. Elvor approached the barrier and, with an inhuman agilty, jumped into the window, after which he began to observe the sight that appeared before him on the other side of the wall.
>In the vast, both in width and height, cave it was light as day. Lamp, identical to the ones before, but working, covered the entire ceiling and the walls. Under the shiny vault a town lied. Even though there was a lot of space in the cave, one-story houses clung to the center, as if they were afraid of its sides. In the center of the town was a paved square, on which stood a building that was notably bigger than others, probably a town hall. All exits of the cave were blocked with walls like the one Elvor was sitting on.
>Elvor put out the torch, jumped down and approached the town. Once he got near, he even stronger felt the ever tense atmosphere and the feeling on anxiety than enveloped the town and all the caves. The buildings had too thick walls and too thin windows as if builders made them with a siege in mind. They were more like miniature castles, rather than houses. In the eyes of all of the townspeople could be seen a fear before some unknown enemy, who wasn't here in the town, but whose presense you could feel, as is everything here was shrouded with their unseen breath.
No one talked to the sudden stranger. It seemed that he was feared too. People gave him staggered gazes and walked past.
>Elvor decided to talk to the townspeople. Having stopped one person, he said to him in the common language:
>- Sorry, could you, please, anwser my one question?
>The person eyed Elvor for a moment, collecting himself, and replied:
>- Yes.
>- It's my first time here. Can you tell me who are you defending from? Why are all exits of this cave blocked?
>- The death lives outside of this cave and you shouldn't go there. If you can leave this cursed planet, please, leave.
>Having said that, the man continued his way. Elvor remeined in the middle of street, deep in thought. It turned out this town really had a mortal and, probably, powerful enemy. But who that was? Who were all those fortifications against? And, by the way, why were there people on this planet?
>Elvor's gaze turned to the town hall that towered above the rest of the houses. That was where he would learn everything.

[Anonymous No.10336520]

>>10336501
i'm going to assume that this is some kind of joke

[Anonymous No.10336558]

>>10333759
fucking kek
also, this:
>>10333747
is utterly awful

[Anonymous No.10336592]

>>10336501
>Bright rays from a burning torch fell onto a young face of a man who was walking through the cave.
You can cut out stuff like that "who was". The image is clear, but the text is crowded. I can hear myself wading through garbage.

>The man's eyes were light green, and of the same light green
"and" looks like "in addition," but then I'm hit with "the same" and a repeated "light green". Just cut the "and of" and change it to "the same light green of his attire." if you want to hold on to the main repetition. I don't get why you develop all that green to end on black though, whats the takeaway here? Stop sawing back and forth on my skull; take your swing and be done with it.

>Edgy teenage description that ends on a weapon then immediately picks up on a name
>The reveal is so cool you have to immediately repeat the name at the start of the next line
Why are you posting shit you wrote 15 years ago anyway?

[Anonymous No.10336628]

>>10333747
You're a little bit too deep into the irony anon. If you're going to do that, then try and let people actually see your tongue in your cheek from time to time. Just saying he "reforged straightforward" would have been a funny and almost oxymoronic pairing for example, but instead you choose to keep the act up too strongly, then simultaneously to blow the joke from the other end as well by allowing the narrator-speaker to understand how to say "I talk too much" in spite of the fact that the joke was supposed to be that he can't. Go for things that sound more like Freudian slips rather than the not-so reluctant admissions of quirkiness you're throwing at me.

[Anonymous No.10336637]

>>10333747
>>10336628
-to clarify what I mean by this, would say that you should try and ensure that the joke is more obvious to the audience than the speaker if you're actually trying to make fun of him.

[Anonymous No.10336755]

>>10336592
>Why are you posting shit you wrote 15 years ago anyway?
I randomly decided to entertain you.

[Anonymous No.10337117]

There was no slant to the sun—it was just there, overhead, burning, making him sweat, making his underwear bind and the shirt stick to his back as if it had been glued on, and why he’d ever let Carolee talk him into this he’d never know. The bus lurched. There was a stink of diesel. Gears ratcheted beneath the floorboards, metal on metal, as if they were going to fuse or maybe explode into a thousand pieces at any moment. He looked beyond Carolee, out the window, feeling ever so slightly queasy, though everyone assured him the water was good here—potable, that was the word on everybody’s lips, as if they were trying to convince themselves. Plus, the food was held to the highest standards and the glasses out of which they’d sipped their rum punch and rum cokes and rum tonics scrupulously washed in hot sudsing pristine well water, because this wasn’t like Mexico or Guatemala or Belize, this was special, orderly, clean, a kind of tourist paradise. And cheap. Cheap too. On top of it all, he had a headache. Or the beginnings of one. But that was understandable, because he’d gulped down three rum punches with lunch, so thirsty he could have drained the whole pitcher the waiter had set in the middle of the table, and no, he wasn’t going to drink the water, no matter what anybody said—not unless it came from a bottle with an unbroken seal. He rubbed his eyes. He had aspirin in his kit back on the ship. Cipro too. But that didn’t do him a whole lot of good now, did it? Anonymous streets rolled by, shops, people, dogs, ratty-looking birds infesting the trees and an armed guard out front of every store—or tienda, as his guidebook had it—and what did that tell you about the level of orderliness here? Bienvenidos. Welcome. Mi casa es su casa.

[Anonymous No.10337184]

>>10335267
please critique

[Anonymous No.10337214]

>>10335690
Unironically kek'd, you should do more of stuff like this. Maybe a collected work of these paragraph long things.

[Anonymous No.10337623]

This was the land of orange grain and earthenware trees. The sky was warm pink with the weight of lazy labor and the villages were huddled mounds of sandstone and bronze. Birds chirped half as often as expected and beasts of burden groaned under distant lash. Yokes harnessed and drove themselves into the flesh of these beasts in a grotesque caricature opposing the land’s placid nature. Across the faces of people with skin like clay wore that bored smile born from generations of peace and prosperity.
Built on the grave of history’s handiwork was the village of the valley. Within it were the people of the valley who adored the ivory man. He had saved the village from boredom, so the elders said. He brought with him virtue and justice, the elders said. Yet even some of the elders took this on good faith for it had been years since he last left his tower. Only the eldest would remember that winter he arrived.
“Yeeess, I remember,” recalled the oldest amongst the village, Petra, a woman among elders of whom all were gathered in council when this story begins. “We were so happy when he came,” Petra’s red smile vitalized her wrinkled face like animated pottery, “We were so bored after the bounty that summer brought us - and the dreams he brought with him were so... lovely back then, distracting us from the ennui our newfound prosperity brought us.”
There exists a balance, an equalizing force, in this land and it was that winter in which the village fell from its precipitous graces of purity. Where sincerity had prevailed hitherto now presided a subtle yet preternatural lust manifesting always in a thirst for sweet, nourishing dream essence. As a moot point of contention the elders had argued for years what caused this fall from grace. But only one, only the oldest, could remember, and she recalled the fateful winter evening in which the village had tempted the cosmic balance, endlessly benign until tampered with. It was this same gathered group of elders, hardly older than toddlers at the time, who gathered hand-in-hand with the rest of the villagers in the flagstone square and called out to the entropic void above in a ritualistic yet misguided effort to quell the winter’s boredom.
In a plane that was neither north, south, east nor west of the village, the ivory man woke from cosmic slumber. Until this point, the ivory man existed erudite in a state of timelessness granting him rest without worry. A dip of the scale which held the world in balance found the ivory man elevated to unnatural status above the village in question - this is something he felt, like an intuitive twist of the gut. They call and so I will answer, the ivory man promised.

[Anonymous No.10337776]

>>10335868

nope just developing ideas with shitty language

glad you think it's bad, I think it's bad too

[Anonymous No.10337853]

>>10337117
You use "as if..." to start a simile 3 times in the first half of the paragraph.

Some sentences feel too long/the end tacked on.
>and why he’d ever let Carolee talk him into this he’d never know.
I'd make that a new sentence for example.

There's some other small editing things that stand out. Some sentences feel too short, or the comas feel too early, or that two sentences should be merged.
>On top of it all, he had a headache. Or the beginnings of one.
Maybe
>On top of it all he had a headache, or the beginnings of one.

Take with a grain of salt, I'm no professional.

[Anonymous No.10337897]

Caustic, bitter hens caught in idle transition. You'd think the faces coagulating sickeningly within the peripherals of vision would shed greater insight towards their own horrid dismay. Instead the merely contort, spitting wildly, braying motley jargon that viciously mutates, as if disguising the awareness of its grueling lack of heavenly emanations. That's the thick, corrosive winter these faulty impressions lay solidified withing; wailing, unheard, sewn shut by the whims of insidious dispositions.
Fractured by necessity, mended out of spite.

[Anonymous No.10337936]

Seine kleinen Augen gingen den Raum nach Veränderungen ab, entdeckten keine - alles war gleich, unverändert. Nichts, seit A.L. gestorben ist, die Ananas, die kann was, hatte sich verändert. Nichts: die Wand, der Spiegel, die Lampe - jedes Objekt war gleich geblieben, war nicht verändert worden. Selbst das entsetzliche Bild, alle hassten es, D.F.s Schatten lag auf ihm, hing noch immer an der Wand, unverändert. Er öffnete seinen Mund wieder. --Warum hängt das Bild da noch? um sieben Uhr achtunddreißig, so als würde er es nicht ahnen, als wüsste er es nicht, so als könnte er - D.F. drehte sich um - es sich nicht denken, dämlicher Vollidiot. Sein ganzes Gewicht, das von N.M., verlagerte sich auf ein Bein, das rechte. Kein Vögelchen zwitscherte um sieben Uhr achtunddreißig, doch das war ihm jetzt egal, es spielte keine Rolle mehr. Sein Lächeln verklebte, schmierig, blieb stecken, --Du weißt, wie teuer der Dreck war.
--Das ist es aber nicht wert, als würde er schmatzen, --Gestern Nacht jedenfalls bin ich gelandet.
--Wohnst du zuhause?
--Fürs Erste.

[Anonymous No.10338063]

“Anton of Murcia!” It was a robust voice, a commanding voice, so not the sheriff’s voice. “How do you fare this warm summer’s eve?”
A hush fell over the mob as they made way for the silver-haired swordsman who spoke. He strolled to their front with all the leisure of a suppertime guest. Along the way, his platemail drank in the crimson torchlight.
“Inquisitor Lorenzo,” Anton called in a tone as stiff as his stance. “Where is Sheriff Acosta?”
“Sheriff Acosta investigates earthly crimes. Witchcraft against the church falls under my jurisdiction.”
“I see.” Anton spoke slowly, “So you’re here to do what? To dismiss these ill-founded claims?” He capped the question with a glare so intense it could only mean, For what good are my bribes if they blind no eyes?
“On the contrary.” Lorenzo pitched his voice like a town crier. “The Bishop is dead, found in his bed with pustules all over. Some say it’s witchcraft to blame. Others say differently. Those are the facts. Facts that differ, yes, but it’s not for me to rank one above the other. We must hold a trial. I will report to the Suprema after I have you under lock and key.”
Anton’s throat tightened enough to lift his voice a pitch. “You know damn well that what I do is smoke and mirrors! Make-believe! Tell them!” He paused to catch his breath. “Do it, damn it!”
“I cannot dispute the truth,” said Lorenzo. “And the truth is that make-believe never killed any bishops.” To pile insult onto injury, he twisted his lip in a nasty little smirk, just between them.
“Bastard!” Anton’s outburst tore a gasp from the crowd. “You sanctimonious bastard! So it comes to this! After taking my bribes for months, you realize just how deep my pockets are! Now you want everything for yourself, is that it?”
“Don’t be ridic-“
“Fine! Take my money!” From his robes Anton yanked a silk coinpurse. He made a show of loosening the drawstring before flinging the whole purse out the window. As it spiraled through the air, it showered the groundlings with copper and silver and even some gold.
“Take it!” Anton shrieked in manic glee. “Take it all! I’ll feed my fortune to the gutter before I let the Inquisition have a taste!”
Argument did little to dampen bloodlust. But money, ah, money could be most effective.
The mob split apart as every rioter fended for his or herself. All of the philters of luck and virility charms and ghost repellent they bought this last year had been instantly refunded in one frenzied free-for-all.

[Anonymous No.10338064]

>>10333661
Rather interesting paragraph. Do you have more? If so please share.

>>10333747
I can kinda see what you're trying to do (A joke right?) and if so try to make the joke a tad bit more obvious.

>>10335267
Right now, I mean, if you can fix all the grammar mistakes it would be an okay first chapter I assume. But the entire thing is littered with mistakes.

My work:
https://pastebin.com/Dr8jRza5

[Anonymous No.10338310]

>>10338063
Good shit, you writing a fantasy series?

>>10337897
"Heavenly emanations" in the context of "spitting wildly...viciously mutates" seems like such a wild contrast that it doesn't work here IMO.

>>10338064
Your narrator thinks/speaks with an eloquence that street performers do not have. I think using more basic language, maybe jargon, in his speech would characterize him better.

[Anonymous No.10338374]

In southeastern Iowa there exists the town of Beggarbend along the Mississippi River. Originally, the town was known as Beggar’s Bend - this was back when pioneers who had crossed the midwest prairies met face to face with the Rocky Mountains and then decided it wasn’t “worth it”. Most of these pioneers returned the way they had come, not after passing their various works of art. Works titled “Oregon or Bust” (graphite on shale, 8 x 22) or “Bury Me West” (sticks on mud, 14 x 40) bordered most of the trail and, after passing these the second time, many of the wagon drivers suddenly seemed intensely interested in some vague distant object. Exhausted and poor, these “go-backs” returned to the Mississippi River ferry landing they had crossed months before. Upon reaching the great river, go-backs were greeted with the same ferryman who escorted them initially. However, they found he wasn’t so eager to ferry their wagons this time.
“To cross the creek, money must speak!” the ferryman so gleefully refrained.
But sir, this is no creek, and surely you remember my family, and the helpings of bacon, coffee, and gunpowder we so generously gave you-
“To cross the creek, money must speak!” the ferryman interrupted always, with an infuriating twinkle in his eye.
Families who had spent their rations and were short on coin found themselves trapped. Initially, efforts were made by the most daring to cross the river without the ferryman’s help. But you see, the ferry landing was unique in that no trees grew for miles around. The grasslands grew tall, sure, but there was not a knock of wood in sight and so great pains were taken by the most dedicated of families to construct vast flotillas of crosshatched grass to replace what would have been a wooden barge. All of these families perished terribly, most about 50 feet offshore in a spectacle that the ferryman took a giddy pleasure in;
“You should have stayed, you should have paid,
A lovely fish meal you have made!”
Recanted the ferryman in perfect verse.
Eventually, families began to give up on hopes of ever leaving the landing and so began that vague process of building a town. The most industrious found an economy in dredging the river banks for the remains of the ill-fated raft builders. If one was lucky, one would come upon a loose copper button on a dead man’s shirt which they could pawn for some cornmeal mysteriously supplied by the ferryman.

[Anonymous No.10338930]

>>10338310
>Your narrator thinks/speaks with an eloquence that street performers do not have.
That's how I wanted to be read. To give hints he is something more.

>I think using more basic language, maybe jargon, in his speech would characterize him better.
Don't worry. He'll use more basic language later on. I don't know about jargon though, I read a few books that peppered character's dialogue with Jargon and it was cringy as fuck.

Was there anything else I could improve upon?

[Anonymous No.10339016]

>>10338374
>short on coin
guhh.
think man!
THINK!

[Anonymous No.10339332]

>>10338064
I'm >>10335267. Could you please identify the mistakes?

[Anonymous No.10339349]

>>10337936
Wurde oben schon als pastebin ignoriert. Nicht ohne Grund. Erstens spricht hier wohl maximal jeder Zwanzigste Deutsch, zweitens ist der Text uninteressant. Warum die Abkürzungen? Um was geht's da überhaupt? Das alles wirkt wie unzusammenhängendes Geschwätz im Drogenrausch.

[Anonymous No.10339411]

>>10339332
Alright. But remember this is subjected and you can ignore this if you don't want to change it.

I just fix the most glaring ones alright. But there's a question I need to ask. Are you American?


https://pastebin.com/cR63Qryu

[Anonymous No.10339437]

Were I not of this earth, I would find the surgery room strange. Here, within the confines of this four-walled limbo, the great walking chemicals operate on one another. They are planets of bundled cells; conglomerations that rise from infancy to be crinkly-eyed men in manatee-gray caps, steadying the innate shake of the hand. Finely sharpened slivers of steel rest on trays. They rise between latex fingers drenched in sterility and slowly unzip the closure of the patient’s skin. From there, little L-shaped arms descend. They pull back tenderly the soft folds of subdermal flesh, which resist like thin sheets of rubber. More razors descend, at times tearing jaggedly the delicate chemical framework that holds tight the contents of the rib cage, and at other times twirling about in small, precise cuts that snip apart final, thin layers. At last, I would watch the infinitely complex children of the Periodic Table reveal a prized jewel: the heart, which lies dark and alone in the chest, glittering like a polished ruby.

[Anonymous No.10339466]

HE LAUNCHED HIMSELF down the slope, slewed up in snow to his thighs, wallowing in the drifts with the rifle held overhead in one hand. He caught himself on a grapevine and swung about and came to a stop. A shower of dead leaves and twigs fell over the smooth mantle of snow. He fetched debris from out of his shirtcollar and looked down the slope to find another stopping place. When he reached the flats at the foot of the mountain he found himself in scrub cedar and pines. He followed rabbit paths through these woods. The snow had thawed and frozen over again and there was a light crust on top now and the day was very cold. He entered a glade and a robin flew. Another. They held their wings aloft and went skittering over the snow. Ballard looked more closely. A group of them were huddled under a cedar tree. At his approach they set forth in pairs and threes and went hopping and hobbling over the crust, dragging their wings. Ballard ran after them. They ducked and fluttered. He fell and rose and ran laughing. He caught and held one warm and feathered in his palm with the heart of it beating there just so.

[Anonymous No.10339482]

>>10339437
>>10339466
Critique others.

[Anonymous No.10339498]

>>10339411
I'm not American but is 'moulding' correct for British English?

[Anonymous No.10339500]

>>10339498
Yes, it is. Ignore that little fix. I correct that Under the assumption you were American.

[Anonymous No.10339528]

>>10339500
Thanks for critiquing the rest, though.

[Anonymous No.10339532]

>>10339437
this is cringe, you are not a writer

[Anonymous No.10339595]

https://fortyeternitiesatsea.wordpress.com/2017/11/11/review-i-am-a-cat-by-natsume-soseki/#more-74

Can someone offer me a critique of my critique? thanks

[Anonymous No.10339608]

There were holy nodes, bastions of great light. A shimmering sea of red, orange, yellow crystalline mind. Shining and exploding intertwined in harmony giving birth to one another within one another rushing past your dreams your eyelids. Everything that ever occurred was there. Filling the Light with either sorrow or joy. Even the sorrow there was built from joy. The pain of it was remedied by the infliction of pain. Horrible men made horrible mistakes and purified themselves in the divine fire. It was like water turned into wine turned back into water again. Humming a miserable prayer.

[Anonymous No.10339711]

>>10339349
I can't think of good names so I just use initials

[Anonymous No.10339728]

>>10339711
There are no good or bad names. Choose such that can exist and read smoothly. You also have some tense issues in the pastebin. Also other more or less minor flaws. Like, er hat gekotzt instead of er hatte gekotzt. And, as I said, the whole thing appears disjointed to me. Build something your reader wil care for.

[Anonymous No.10339832]

>>10339728
Das wechselnde Tempus ist Absicht (siehe z.B. direkt hinter "er hat gekotzt" "jetzt ist alles blöd") und tritt immer dann auf, wenn die Erzählung ist Bewusstseinsstrom-artige abgleitet. Dass alles ein wenig kryptisch, fragmentarisch, zerlegt, bestenfalls schizophren wirkt, ist ebenfalls so gedacht. Schade, dass es dir nicht gefällt. Trotzdem, danke für dein Feedback.

[Anonymous No.10339850]

>>10339832
Sollen wir uns mal auf eine Sprache einigen? Ob es mir persönlich gefällt ist ja wurscht. Ich versuche auszudrücken und herauszufinden wo meines Erachtens nach die Probleme liegen.

Deine Intention, durch den Wechsel im Narrativ Infos zum Protagonisten weiterzugeben ist ja erstmal toll. Aber warum habe ich das nicht verstanden? Ist es mir zu hoch oder kannst du vielleicht noch daran feilen, sodass das deutlicher für den Leser wird? Was wird es denn? Eine Kurzgeschichte?

[Anonymous No.10339876]

>>10339832
>>10339850
No comprendo.

[Anonymous No.10339888]

>>10339850
Ja, Deutsch natürlich, keine Ahnung, warum ich eben auf Englisch geantwortet habe.

Ich weiß noch nicht, was das wird. Möglicherweise eine Kurzgeschichte, vielleicht aber auch gar nichts. Das ist das erste Mal, dass ich aus eigenem Antrieb was Fiktionales geschrieben habe und wollte erstmal bisschen rumprobieren, stilistisch etc.

[Anonymous No.10339914]

>>10339888

Ah, verstehe. Nun, ich denke es kommt auch darauf an wie es dir gefällt denn die schönste Kritik nutzt ja nichts, wenn sie im Prinzip nur sagt, mach alles anders als du eigentlich wolltest.

Aber. Vielleicht könntest du erst den Plot ausarbeiten, eine erste Fassung abschließen und herausfinden, was du eigentlich sagen willst. Dann könntest du dieses Gerüst nehmen und stilistisch umbauen. Statt dir umgekehrt aufgrund eines besonderen Stils einen Plot aus dem Hirn zu kratzen, der dann vielleicht unschön wirkt.

Viel Erfolg.

[Anonymous No.10339925]

>>10339528
Yeah, no problem. You might also want to critique other people also.

[Anonymous No.10340173]

>>10339595
bump

[Anonymous No.10340266]

>>10335690
>just got comments back on these
>someone wrote, in bright blue ink, "where's the lineation"?

[Anonymous No.10340286]

>>10338064

[Anonymous No.10340290]

>>10338310
>I think using more basic language, maybe jargon
What? You do know jargon is the opposite of basic language, right?

[Anonymous No.10340426]

[Anonymous No.10340435]

>>10340426
The first "so" is giving me issues now that I think about it.

[Anonymous No.10340456]

>>10340426
>>10335690

You don't have the wit for this form.

[Anonymous No.10340459]

>>10340426
>cigarette
>put in
>mom
freud.jpg

[Anonymous No.10340517]

>>10340456
You're right, I need to worry more about the actual humor than the wording, at least in the third one.

[Anonymous No.10340554]

>>10340517
That came out shittier than intended. Brevity is a good exercise but it doesn't justify a scene without direction or payoff.

Good luck, and read this if you want to see how this form functions at a level worth publishing.

http://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/pete-segall-11-21-2017

[Anonymous No.10340749]

>>10339437
I get what you're trying to say, and you could explore it, but the prose is a bit much. Kill some adjectives. The message as you're presenting it isn't really that subtle either- 'planets of bundled cells', 'delicate chemical framework', 'children of the periodic table' could all be effectively communicated without necessarily pointing it out once, let alone three times. The idea has some potential, and you have a good vocabulary, just change the approach a bit.

>>10338063
I like it- I pictured the scene well in my mind. A highlight for me was 'strolled to their front with all the leisure of a suppertime guest'. One thing I would say is to keep focusing on showing rather than telling- the scene was readily conjured in my head, so my mind fills in details, and when you then present facts which contradict these details it jars subtly. I already see that the Inquisitor is unexpected, and that Anton will be thrown by this, so you don't need to tell me his tone is stiff. If we know from earlier that Anton has bribed people, we can gather his surprise from the slowness of his voice, and the addendum about 'what good are my bribes' is unnecessary and feels odd. Like I said, I liked it- just cut out some of the direct narrative addresses, and cut out some of the descriptions which the reader would have imagined anyway.


They got to talking. The lady’s father, it seemed, was some sort of independently wealthy man whose great-grandfather had been a merchant of some description, and who now had investments in seemingly everything in the world in some way or another, if the girl was to be believed, from large international businesses including the airline they currently were using (“although not for much longer,” she assured, with a scornful look at the stewardess), to numerous small businesses across England. She spoke as the moderately wealthy often do, with the intent to casually impress, by talking of things such as large houses, expensive clothing, a multitude of foreign holidays such as the excursion in Budapest from which she was returning. He, in turn, responded as the listener usually will: with a polite, measured awe, an imitation of admiration, the whole charade as cold and meaningless as the sums of money used to purchase such things. Only if the boast veers onto a specific interest will this feigned awe give way to real wonder, excitement, envy; if, say, the boaster mentions expensive tickets for an esteemed ballet company to an aspiring ballerina. Yet this new, real reaction is only because it corresponds to a personal passion- hours spent in practice pursuing an undying sense of beauty, which may trace its conception to the single movement of a dancer seen as a child.

[Anonymous No.10341611]

>>10339608
Bump

[Anonymous No.10341690]

>>10333573
>a human kettle, facing each other in responsibility
great imagery, would read more

>>10333661
couple of descriptions id change like souls of suicides but skillful writing. id read more

>>10333747
too meta. trying to be cute. would stop reading right there.

>>10335444
>shake like chain-linked fences in the desperate grip of the starving
fantastic, but the rest bored me. not interested in another story about a rabid madman. also, the rest was filled with cliches.

>>10337897
thesaurus meme. please tame your use of adjectives.

[Anonymous No.10341832]

>>10340749
I like it. Maybe break up the first few sentences a bit?

[Anonymous No.10341886]

Do you feel the transition coming? I don't. I don't give a shit. That's what I'd say if I didn't give a shit. I'm just hiding my shit behind five layers.

1. Stupidity
2. Irony
3. False Persona
4. A psychoanalytic glare
5. Reactionary culture

I hope they never figure out that I could tear it down. I hope they do figure out that I'm not trying to. Maybe then I could finally surround myself with decent company. And in decent I mean lacking the mind-qualities of decency. The freedom of whatever. If you criticize me I'll make you feel like a moron. Because it's something you worry about. Because you have certain ideas about what a thing should be. Me, I'm just good will hunting.

[Anonymous No.10341903]

>>10340554
>http://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/pete-segall-11-21-2017


Thank you for posting this. I didn't know such a form existed. Some of these are exquisite.

[Anonymous No.10341960]

>>10339914
Vielen Dank, auch für den Tipp mit dem Plot. Hast du abgesehen vom Plot noch andere Kritikpunkte, z.b. bezüglich der Sprache?

[Anonymous No.10341974]

>>10333661
the description of breakfast was autism. the rest was alright

[Anonymous No.10342007]

>>10341974
Surprised by the amount of pushback I've gotten so far on the breakfast description. But thanks blood, point taken.

[Anonymous No.10342110]

>>10342007
The weird thing is I enjoyed the breakfast scene. The descriptions of all the food got my mouth watering, I love breakfast food. It just goes to show that while that anon and the others may not like it, there will always be others who do. I guess if the majority are against it you've got to listen to that, but if you like it, just know that there are others who do too. 11pm here and my stomach was growling thanks to your post.

[Anonymous No.10342294]

>>10340554
>Brevity is a good exercise but it doesn't justify a scene without direction or payoff.
That makes sense. The advice I got irl was to overwrite and then cut away instead of writing up to an endpoint and stopping.

Was it clear that things like the second eggnog were jokes though? I'm not sure how deliberate I look.

[Anonymous No.10342694]

>>10333661
"I have been appointed" should be "had been".

The way you use the phrase "common sense" like that is also really weird. You seem to litteraly mean "the most-common sense" or "the most typical perspective"/"popular opinion"/"general consensus" etc, but the phrase "common sense" isn't usually used like that.

>>10342007
I agree with the others that the breakfast thing sounded good on it's own, there's just something unwarranted about it. It almost seems fetishistic or something. It's very out of the blue.

[Anonymous No.10342703]

Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.
Let us discover some new alphabet,
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves,
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,-
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion,
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.
There is an oriole who, upside down,
Hangs at his nest, and flicks an orange wing,-
Under a tree as dead and still as lead;
There is a single leaf, in all this heaven
Of leaves, which rain has loosened from its twig:
The stem breaks, and it falls, but it is caught
Upon a sister leaf, and thus she hangs;
There is an acorn cup, beside a mushroom
Which catches three drops from the stooping cloud.
The timid bee goes back to the hive; the fly
Under the broad leaf of the hollyhock
Perpends stupid with cold; the raindark snail
Surveys the wet world from a watery stone...
And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,-on a hawthorn leaf,-
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.

[Anonymous No.10342983]

Yo creo que me emborracho
por angustia de mí mismo.
El alma toma la forma
del vaso que la contiene.

[Anonymous No.10343056]

>>10342703
What is the point of posting poetry written by someone else? Are you hoping for a "ha, gotcha!" when someone critiques it?

[Anonymous No.10343100]

>>10343056

ha, gotcha

[Anonymous No.10343247]

>>10342694
Thanks for that substantive feedback. Much appreciated, dog.

[Anonymous No.10343293]

>>10335704
severely underrated, 7/10

[Anonymous No.10343356]

Tin sandpipers scurry across the kitchen windowsill -frozen in time. The morning sun shines past them, birthing new pipers upon the opposing wall. Great birds of shadow, much larger than their parentage. They fluctuate in length and width as the sun rises. They are an ever changing flock, forever cursed to follow a linear migration.

An urgent beeping, violent and shrill. A steady flow of liquid. The shadow-pipers retreat towards the cupboards. The aroma of coffee fills the kitchen. Slowly, carefully, the shadowy birds scale the cupboards and roost atop the counter. Their migration is complete.

From behind a sheet of glass, a brightly colored piper watches them. She is trapped. Never to know the floor, the cupboards, the countertop. Most painfully, she exists within a serene world of her own, yet is wholly unable to walk its beaches not wander its reeds. Her eyes forever locked forward. A world forever concealed behind her.

[Anonymous No.10343379]

A foolish man sits beneath an incredibly old and beautiful tree. The man is drunk and lazily fingers off-key notes from his father’s favorite guitar, sometimes singing along in soft Spanish old lyrics of love and disaster and prayers to the Mother of God for salvation from both. Occasionally he stops playing long enough to drink from a nearly empty bottle and in the silence of the fields in the absence of his music he imagines tiny bearded creatures from mythology stop their secret dancing behind distant rocks and the misted tree line beyond, catching their breaths in each other’s arms and listening for the next dirge to begin. He pours the dregs down into the stones and dirt and roots beneath him as a final sad-hearted offering to his hidden audience, before violently whipping the emptied vessel forward through the quiet space between him and the gravestone he had come to the tree to visit, shattering the bottle against the name and numbers carved there and leaving a cryptic augury of broken glass at the bottom of the crooked cross as his only offering of remembrance to the dead below.

[Anonymous No.10343419]

i just recorded a thing and i don't like it
i wont delete it because it was a hill and i hiked it
now i'm putting on my shoes like like mike did
to go get a soda despite the health hazards

if i don't think about it it might psychic
its way into my brain parasite like
so that my id can puzzle piece it into my psyche
bly me i never thought about it that way, haha get it
when raspberry's haha spit it do they call it human
when the blueman group lies do they call it tru-man
because like, they're the opposite of people,
and so what they do, must also have the property of paradox
a pair of socks is what i put on before those shoes i was talking about
tantalus could have used a spout, or a funnel, or a straw
maybe he wouldn't have suffered so much if he came equiped
maybe sisyphus would have been happier if he slipped
a trip down memory lane includes munchkins

and a bunch of free lunch kits that are lacking a protein supplement
for your troubles, a mint, not only does it make your breath smell better
but it coats you in a nice, icy-hot, layer sponsered by shaquille o'neal
well, promoted by shaquille o'neal, it's sponsored by icy-hot
can a product sponsor itself
can climbing a shelf induce a fear of heights if there's something you want at the top
don't pass the uncoordinated friend the bop-it
and if you're trying to make a loop hole out of a sphere just stop it

[Anonymous No.10343425]

>>10343356
>>10343379
>>10343419
critique others

[Anonymous No.10343430]

>>10343425

I'm not a critic srry I'm just a person :(((

[Anonymous No.10343438]

>>10343430
not an excuse critique other people

[Anonymous No.10343443]

>>10343438
I don't know why that person answered for me, but I have done.

[Anonymous No.10343449]

>>10343438

I think this is terrible because it is too forceful and doesn't communicate the sense that you believe in what you're saying enough to the point that it will get the desired result.

[Anonymous No.10343483]

Hi all. I self published to KDP after getting some professional editing done. KDP marketing isn't going so good (7 impressions, kek) and I'll likely be putting this on KDP Direct soon.

There is a free preview in Kindle. No need to buy the whole thing. I need to know if this appeals to people or if it's destined for the trashcan. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.ca/Instruments-War-John-Briggs-ebook/dp/B0784DMLP7/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1512195175&sr=1-4&keywords=instruments+of+war

[Anonymous No.10343493]

>>10343483
Oh, it's supposed to be 261 pages, not 376. Amazon is being stupid.

[Anonymous No.10343502]

>>10343483
Sounds like a YA

Stephen Hawking's warning that humanity should never respond to alien communication has gone unheeded for too long, and now the human-led United Planetary Coalition is faced with a seemingly insurmountable threat from a brutal and merciless race known as the Jaari. With mounting casualties and obliterated colonies, the desperate UPC turns to conscripting prison convicts into active military service, with promises that these men and women will be turned into the next generation of super soldiers—the Avatars. This includes disgraced starship Captain Joaquin Lafontaine, who sees this opportunity as a means to redeem himself.

However, the program is shrouded in mystery. Joaquin will discover the Avatar program's true nature and will struggle not only to defeat the Jaari against all odds but to also retain his humanity—and perhaps his very soul.

[Anonymous No.10343810]

Sorry its 5am I'm gonna die, this is 1/3 of s short story inspired by lovecraft and a creature I saw on my trip up north.

The Trespasser

1921, may 17th. Thomas E. Scotsburn left for Alaska from his current residence in a small university town in the Canadian Yukon, where he spent most his time between field research and the Schools Archives.

Scotsburn, an archeologist who despite his recognition for his academic achievement was thought as if an eccentric, often accused of being radicalized. This was due to his out of field obsession with cognitive neuroscience and eugenics which he was most vocal of, making reference in both his papers and lectures, alongside an abhorrence for theism and the superstitious.

His focus on this assignment was that of ceremonial and decorative tradition within the last frontiers wild men ancestors culture, which would give insight to craftsmanship and what tools they had at the time.

Scotsburn drove three days in the Alaskan Range , finding himself fortunate little rain befell him from the dreary overcast above. The mountains were gradually becoming smaller the closer he rolled near the destination, the mountains were now ridden with moss, spring-snow and virgin spruce, the river decorated with water lily and cat tails. Forget-me-Nots and fireweed contrasted with the somber mist that engulfed the area. Fauna made itself present in sound, chipmunks and returning geese and in sight with the crossing ungulates forcing Scotsburn to halt, only then to speed up in avoidance of the plagues of mosquitoes that awaited all that was still.

He was now less then 30 minutes from the Reserve. Readying his equipment sat on the empty passenger seat when something caught his eye. He quickly looked up to see a creature "A black bear" he said unsure. It stood looking, not perturbed by the approaching automobile. He took notice to it gaunt appearance and gangly legs, which it stood on four of. The beast was peering directly at him, which sent a chilling shock up his spine. He was drawing near and without a top on his car he felt threatened, "Be gone you!" He screeched, but the beast still just stood staring at him. He sped up as fast he could and successfully made it past, looking behind in his mirror was the most disturbing, as the beast turned around stood staring back at him from afar.

[Anonymous No.10343841]

>>10343425
You are enforcing bullshit posts.

I'd rather have no one replying to my stuff than someone who brainfarts two lines of flattery so they can have their own piece criticized.

[Anonymous No.10343891]

Do not mourn those dear who have died if you yourself have killed God! What an offense it is to kill God and you want to mourn the little with your deed stained? Spilling Divine blood is cathartic, but a pawn meets its death and you break. To mourn loved ones as those who killed God serves none to the dead. This mourning by God’s murders reveals of an affirmation how they loved that person. But when asked if that dear one passed loves them, they must not say a word. They are bounded to a small space where exceeding questions are too far for any answer to be heard. Their hearts will suffer death ignorant to whether their dead loved ones love them or not.
Regarding the morbid idea of something after death is as untouched as the Grim Reaper; it seems to be a taboo exploration to imagine what might happen after dying. It is a topic and question of interest to no naturalist, materialist, and atheist. Why? Man is allowed to ponder upon the unobservable universe, beyond light’s reach. He is permitted to think about black holes. Yet he may affirm the transcendental laws of logic. But the moment he dares to contemplate upon reality after death and the possible existence of God, he is berated with absolute intuition. Nothing is after death! There is no God! There are the laws of logic! These men are restricted to the insane simplicity of materialism or even pure scientism; they cannot expand past the five senses of man among fourteen billion years of light, where dwarfing ceases to stop. If the resolution of killing God is to become gods ourselves, we find we cannot make the grade. We gods may walk on water in the storm to only find we are sinking as Peter. He was of little faith and we are of little divinity. If we are to create our own meaning, morality, divinity, man compared to the ever-expanding universe approaches the grand size of none. This is to even imply our universe is in some objective sense, “large”. For the God killer, he is destined to be a god himself, dominated by towering matter of a tiny universe.

[Anonymous No.10343900]

>>10343891
shoot, I aint got my paragraphs, sorry guys

[Anonymous No.10344683]

The thick ceramic red mug, the one that felt empty in her hand, and even heavier when full, was quickly procured from the drying rack next to the sink. The mug was her personal favorite, and was the first birthday present she got from Jessica. Actually, now that she reflected on it, it has been the only birthday present she got from Jessica. Although that is to be expected when you have been dating someone for less than a year. With its deep brighter than burgundy shade, and a small black square that simply red “Foxy Baby” with a cartoon picture of a fox pup curled up beneath it, Hailey used the mug at least every other day to help fuel her burgeoning caffeine addiction. She placed the mug on the machines little platform and closed its lid with a little pop as the needle punctured the little coffee pod. She selected the size she wanted (the largest possible with the strongest taste and caffeine content, if that wasn’t painfully obvious) and turned around to lean against the counter. The knot she had tied in the front of her robe had loosened throughout her journey from the bedroom to the kitchen, and left her naval and a thin strip of skin extending from the knot to her throat exposed to the cold kitchen air. She made no motion to fix the robe, but also no motion to expose more of her skin. She waited in a self-imposed limbo too see if a draft would make the decision for her. Several moments went by, and her decision was taken out of her hands, as the coffee maker shot out several loud spurts of liquid that always signaled that the coffee was down filling the cup.

[Anonymous No.10344905]

The sun he feared the most, for it was so large and bright and he could not hope to comprehend it. Even the pale moon so far away was to him a searing disc which sent him cowering. But it was not only the lights of the world outside that had his hatred. He hated also the sight of his own body and the forms of others, for they had become grotesque and he was sickened by all thoughts and feelings of the flesh. Therefore, he took to wandering the halls with his eyes closed, but he found even in that darkness small patches of light still defied him. So it was that he took a knife to his right eye and thought to carve it from its socket, but he had not the heart. From then his anguish at living was increased and he forsook even the most basic of foods.

“For to eat,” thought he, “is to be as the crawling things in their endless ravening hunger. I shall not be as the crawling things. Nay, I shall not endure this shell overlong. ”

[Anonymous No.10344950]

>>10344683
>The thick ceramic red mug, the one that felt empty in her hand, and even heavier when full, was quickly procured from the drying rack next to the sink. The mug was her personal favorite, and was the first birthday present she got from Jessica. Actually, now that she reflected on it, it has been the only birthday present she got from Jessica. Although that is to be expected when you have been dating someone for less than a year. With its deep brighter than burgundy shade, and a small black square that simply red “Foxy Baby” with a cartoon picture of a fox pup curled up beneath it, Hailey used the mug at least every other day to help fuel her burgeoning caffeine addiction. She placed the mug on the machines little platform and closed its lid with a little pop as the needle punctured the little coffee pod. She selected the size she wanted (the largest possible with the strongest taste and caffeine content, if that wasn’t painfully obvious) and turned around to lean against the counter. The knot she had tied in the front of her robe had loosened throughout her journey from the bedroom to the kitchen, and left her naval and a thin strip of skin extending from the knot to her throat exposed to the cold kitchen air. She made no motion to fix the robe, but also no motion to expose more of her skin. She waited in a self-imposed limbo too see if a draft would make the decision for her. Several moments went by, and her decision was taken out of her hands, as the coffee maker shot out several loud spurts of liquid that always signaled that the coffee was down filling the cup.

Fix red to read and Naval to Navel. You also want to remove the commas from favorite and kitchen. and while I cannot locate them they are some words that seem rather questionable in their usage.

[Anonymous No.10345101]

>>10343502
So, is it trash?

[Anonymous No.10345109]

>>10333573
Great imagery, a few of the lines are memorable, sadly some of them are hindered due to being a tad descriptive in some areas.

>>10343483
>I need to know if this appeals to people or if it's destined for the trashcan. Thank you.
A book will always have a certain appeal to certain people, nonetheless, that doesn't mean it won't be destined for the trashcan, anon.


>>10343810
Going to level with you anon. I'm tired as fuck, but I will try my best for you since this seems rather interesting. So I apologize if I miss a few errors.

>where he spent most his time between field research and the Schools Archives.

where he spent most his time in field research and the Schools Archives.

>which would give insight to craftsmanship and what tools they had at the time.
which would give insight into craftsmanship and what tools they had at the time.

>He was now less then 30 minutes from the Reserve. Readying his equipment sat on the empty passenger seat when something caught his eye. He quickly looked up to see a creature "A black bear" he said unsure. It stood looking, not perturbed by the approaching automobile. He took notice to it gaunt appearance and gangly legs, which it stood on four of. The beast was peering directly at him, which sent a chilling shock up his spine. He was drawing near and without a top on his car he felt threatened, "Be gone you!" He screeched, but the beast still just stood staring at him. He sped up as fast he could and successfully made it past, looking behind in his mirror was the most disturbing, as the beast turned around stood staring back at him from afar.


He was now less than 30 minutes from the Reserve. Readying his equipment sat on the empty passenger seat when something caught his eye. He quickly looked up to see a creature "A black bear" he said unsurely. It stood looking, not perturbed by the approaching automobile. He took notice of its gaunt appearance and gangly legs, which it stood on four of. The beast was peering directly at him, which sent a chilling shock up his spine. He was drawing near and without a top, on his car, he felt threatened, "Be gone you!" He screeched, but the beast still just stood to stare at him. He sped up as fast he could and successfully made it past, looking behind in his mirror was the most disturbing, as the beast turned around stood to stare back at him from afar.


Here's mine: https://pastebin.com/ebbhQVEa

[Anonymous No.10345130]

>>10343891
Disagree wholeheartedly with the entire sentiment but I enjoyed the passage non the less. You have a gift for words.

[Anonymous No.10345183]

>>10345109

[Anonymous No.10345204]

>>10343891
Pretentious as fuck. Go on

[Anonymous No.10345224]

I'm ESL so this is a translated text.

1) The hospital restaurant is nearly empty. I look out through the window. It's snowing.
- Do you believe in love at first sight?
N looks at me. I look back at him.
- You pose such difficult questions, he answers, with a slightly dramatic voice.
- And...
He takes a sip of water.
- Mm. No.
- No.
A few seconds of silence. He starts eating again.
- How many sights does it take then, I continue.
- Many.
I keep looking at him. By now, I'm probably staring. Intensely. He keeps eating.
I don't know what answer I want. Maybe I just want someone to reassure me, put objective words to my feelings. I look out through the window again.
Suddenly, a metallic sound. His knife and fork are on the plate.
- But I think there's some kinda, the brain knows that you'd work really great with that person. Like how you can tell by a patient's looks that this one, this one has this kind of personality. It's not love at first sight, but, attraction, maybe.
- Hm.
I don't know what to answer. Silence. I'm happy he doesn't ask anything.
- Are you done? I finally ask.
- Yeah.
We get up and carry our trays to the exit.

2) I really tried to be normal. I had a boyfriend for almost two years. I still feel ashamed about that. I tricked him. Or, I just thought that if we were together for long enough, I’d understand that thing that seems to be so natural to everyone else. I used him. For the sake of my own egoistic theory. Eventually he saw through me. I am thankful for that. Otherwise, we might have continued for much longer. Moved together, had kids.
We worked really well together. We had fun together. It was just that I never wanted sex. I was content having someone to spend the evenings with every now and then. I conceded because I thought this was how things should be like. I guess I was happy for him, that he seemed to love me, got horny by me. Maybe I could stand having him inside me as long as he was the one doing it all, and all I had to do was lie there and, exist. But blowing him was completely out of the question. I guess that was one of the things that gave it away. I mean, in the old days it was considered dirty, but to me, it was much more than that. Just thinking about it was repulsive. I never did it. He seemed sad about that, but put up with it. Until that one day.
continuation: https://pastebin.com/MAVzazzf

I barely read novels in English so I can't critique well. I tried one at least.
>>10344683
>thick ceramic red mug, the one that felt empty in her hand, and even heavier when full
"even heavier" feels off because "empty" makes it seem light
>a small black square that simply red “Foxy Baby”
A square isn't letters so it reads awkwardly
>machines little platform ... with a little pop ... little coffee pod
Might want to use a synonym here
>her decision was taken out of her hands
She's already given the decision to the draft

[Anonymous No.10345232]

>>10345130
Aw, thank you my friend! I posted it late last night; I want to read other's passages as well!

[Anonymous No.10345304]

>>10345224
>I'm ESL so this is a translated text.
How many words do you know?
http://testyourvocab.com/

[Anonymous No.10345328]

>>10344905
"But it was not only the lights of the world outside that had his hatred"
I really enjoyed this line and the last little part!

Am i correct in saying your character is quarreling with sin? Seems biblical.

Where it needs help:

It feels structured every sentence.
You're almost prompting each one like: "When i did this, X" "So then i did Y" etc etc.

Just try to flow your thoughts more! It's not bad, theres good potential there

[Anonymous No.10345453]

>>10345304
16100
I generally use words that are used in spoken language, so the relative non-complexity of the translated texts is true to my original texts. The words I didn't manage to translate were the sound to describe utensils being placed on a plate, and a slang expression for getting horny and sexually interested in another person.
My vocabulary is very lacking for reading novels, but even when I know all the words, it can be difficult to comment on the prose because I don't have the reading experience to accurately tell whether issues with flow and readability are due to actual bad writing, or just my English skill.

[Anonymous No.10345525]

>>10345109
>>10345109
Chapter One: Garnet

“Madam, as I told you before and I will tell you once more, I'm not a private detective nor do I have the credentials to be one, I'm just a street performer.” I reiterate to the woman standing across from me as I question why she would ever confuse me with a PI. Although if I were a betting man, I would venture to suspect its the overcoat I'm wearing. Even so, the look in her eyes tells me she is adamant in her initial assumption of me.
--
“I am not trying to play the fool nor am I lying to you madam, and speaking plainly and honestly, I have no idea what you are blaming me for, but if you believe I have wronged you in any way, please tell me so that I may right that wrong.” I declare earnestly, hoping this will be enough for her to stop badgering me, if only for the time being. And besides, I don't want rumor spreading that I con the pockets of elderly women. I wouldn't be able to show my face here, with such notoriety following me.

The old woman beams with joy from my declaration, obviously proud of herself that she won our little spat. Not wasting any time, she signals me to follow her to what I assume her home to have a private chat.
(discussion sounds older for me, fits setting better)

I am actually curious to what she thinks he did, as for critisicm, I was left without a setting to imagine. This may be good though, I pictured a gloomy aesthetic with the setting sometime in the 1800s, Architecture in a city reminiscent of victorian era Britian / New England, early fall season with most people dressed in dark over coats.

Is this the setting your work takes place? If so then it's clear you succeeded with planting imagery with your prose without actually addressing it directly.

>what I changed
- Dropped "even"

- Attempted to restructure the "VIA" sentance, due to the time and place I was imaging that phrase kinda broke my emersion for a small moment. (Doesn't mean much since I'm one guy)

Overall interesting work, this is the anon that you critiqued earlier (The Alaska 1/3) would have responded sooner but fell asleep after I posted.

One last thing, I am 100% beginner so take what I say lightly, the next day I always look at what I wrote and cringe, ESP last night, so many grammar mistakes although I wrote that on an iPod at 4AM.

Regards,

[Anonymous No.10345594]

>>10345328
Thank you. I've tried to adopt a more archaic approach to my writing to give it weight, but I can see why it'd feel rather robotic. The character is actually a mad king who fears nature and the wilderness. To put it simply, he sees something in the "outside" that causes him to shun his earthly shell. He essentially realises his dominion is small in comparison to the kingdom of nature. He hates the sound of his own voice and the sight of his body because he realises he's just another beast. He feels worthless, like a crawling creature. It's part of a dark medieval tale.

[Anonymous No.10345600]

It was said that when you hit rock bottom, you can always dig deeper. It was believed by many, and they dug, and they dug. When they saw that others were not sullied by the dirt, they dragged them down with them, and murdered those who didn't comply. Content, they started digging again.
Eventually, the act of digging and barbarism came to be known as progress.

[Anonymous No.10345734]

>>10345594
sounds intriguing anon; he is a king dwarfed by the behemoths of the natural world. Idk if there's more, but you should totally describe natural landscapes in great detail and really personify them

[Anonymous No.10345762]

Don had finished taking a shower and was brushing his hair when the phone rang. He caught his breath. “Hello.”

“Hi, is this Don?”

“Yes, how are you?” Wow, he thought her voice sparkled.

“I’m at the Rusty Pelican, you still coming down.”

“Oh, oh, of course Betty. I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll be waiting. Bye.”

“Good-bye.” He clicked the phone down and exhaled. This being his first blind date ever made him both excited and nervous. After a squirt of Old-Spice and a rinse with peppermint mouthwash he heads out.

As the taxi pulls up to the night-club Don pays the driver then steps through the plate glass door into the thump of techno music and a pulsating strobe light. The smell of sweat and whiskey fills the room as he glances over at the bar where Betty sits.

Their conversation seems to be going well until she starts talking about her future goals. Trophy wife, did she just say trophy fucking wife, it’s too bad she went through her life with such a beautiful body, yet her brain made out of cottage cheese. She tells Don how her parents put her though the best schools. She tells him how she always gets what she wants. She thinks so much of herself, what a beast.

“You’re really beautiful, you know that,” he said.

“Thanks, let’s get outta here,” she said with a wink.

Outside, it has started to sprinkle; they dodge puddles and try to hail a cab. Here comes one. It isn’t going to stop. Perfect. Grabbing her by the hair, Don whips her into the yellow death machine. Grinding and screams fill the late night air. He walks home, whistling.

[Anonymous No.10345860]

Turning off the engine and the lights,
the fisherman let his boat come to a stall.
From the last light of sunset he saw his wake,
and knew he would go no further.

The fisherman had gone on his last voyage,
weary and seeking a final resting place.
Here in nature’s last frontier,
he would not find a nobler grave.

[Anonymous No.10345913]

>>10345600
Context needed.

[Anonymous No.10345927]

>>10345860
No rhyme, no rhythm, no capitalization in even-numbered lines. That's three strikes.

[Anonymous No.10345937]

>>10345762
>“Oh, oh, of course Betty. I’ll be there soon.”
People who know eachother's names never say them in real life conversations. I know that it's exposition for the audiences, but makes the dialogue feel ever so slightly artificial.

>“Thanks, let’s get outta here,” she said with a wink.
People don't wink in real life

[Anonymous No.10345951]

>>10345860
I understand that poetry doesn't have to rhyme, but it should at least have rhythm. Your syllabes are all over the place and it reads like prose with awkward line breaks.

[Anonymous No.10346041]

>>10345927
>>10345951
Thanks, I agree with you guys. English isn't my first language anyway.

[Anonymous No.10346044]

>>10345951
Look at him, look at him and laugh.
He thinks rhyming is tough.
Poetry needs rhymes to sound good,
While rhythm can go fuck itself. Understood?

[Anonymous No.10346115]

>>10346044
Perfect example why rhythm is needed 2/10

[Anonymous No.10346315]

Shit on my fucking life!

I found myself outside at night, it was windy and chilled and so very blue, yet I was dressed hawaiian, but I was only superimposed. I was not present for what I was witnessing. Like watching someone use a telephone through a glass window.
There was a t-shirted shadow figure skating around the blacktop under a central streetlight in the parking lot of the Olive Garden. The restaurant was closed to the public at the time. Thieves entered through a kitchen window in order to steal a brown and black leather recliner at gunpoint. They got away easily due to the security guards primitive spears.
The skater circled around a landscaped central island amidst the cold dark lot. Under the looming street light was short cylindrical stone structure. Nothing more than a decorated hole in the ground to the skater, but I knew it was an elevator.
I got off the phone. It disappeared as soon as I hit the end button. I was in the Cape Cod mall at the central information kiosk.
“How to convert my dollars?” was a question I posed to the dark green fungus creature.
A shrill screech indicated I should walk over to a incredibly large cylindrical ATM with five different ports encircling it, occupied by various beings. I was adjacent to Teavana.
I walked up to the machine as It turned on. To call the interface presented to me a screen would be wholly inaccurate: a rectangle cut from the face of the cylinder, no more than ten inches deep. Beyond those ten inches could only be described as endless layers of transparent black velvet. Faint light faded up from deep within the fabrics. Thick gray fog began passing over the first layer from all directions, circling and clashing. Soon it appeared as if I were in a plane looking down at clouds passing by and after about a minute a distorted projection appeared from behind the first layer of velvet. Distorted so almost as if it was pre recorded. That implied the machine already knew exactly what I was going to do and when. This did not bother me. I was informed by myself that this machine would convert US dollars into Hell dollars, the only currency I could use in the mall.
This machine was infuriating, it took a single minute to convert one US Dollar to one Hell
Dollar. I was in a hurry because I was going to catch a film. The film started in twenty minutes and costed one-hundred Hell Dollars. It wasn’t even worth it. I looked up at the ceiling: nothing but cavernous stalactites and bacterial buildups dripping. The sudden sensation that Fox Mulder had entered the mall overwhelmed me.

[Anonymous No.10347104]

>>10345453
not good enough

[Anonymous No.10347112]

>>10345951
As opposed to what? The Divine Comedy? The Divine Comedy actually reads better if you ignore the line breaks and parse it according to its grammar. Longfellow translation. Prove me wrong

[Anonymous No.10347143]

Well, I'm a porn writer making my first steps into 'respectable' fiction. Here's a bit from one of my many, many abandoned projects.

“No! Get away!”

The professor's head shot up, as the crack of a bullet pierced even the howling gale. Across the beach, some distance from him, stood a man – Tall, burly, dressed in a torn yellow rain slicker, a pistol in his hands and a look of sheer terror twisting his chiseled face. Vauhn froze as the main raised his gun and fired once more – Not at any assailant, but at the waves themselves, which seemed almost to be rising up higher with every cycle.

Another shot, and another – The waves rose yet higher, almost lapping at his feet, before he turned, tossing the pistol across the rocky shingle, and attempted to make a break for the woods. Before he'd gone a step, the wave crashed down on him, engulfing his legs and slamming him face-first into the ground. The man, now yowling and clearly mad with fright, kicked vainly at the spray as the water retreated, dragging him a foot or two closer, before rising up again.

The wave towered over the man, at least twice the height of any normal human, and for a moment, Vauhn could've sworn he saw the man's expression change, his terrified frown turning into a wide, orgiastic smile, his eyes gleaming in some unearthly light, his mouth opening and mouthing, perhaps whispering something inaudible to the distant professor. Then, a second later, the wave crashed back down upon him.

He kicked and thrashed against the water as it dragged him toward the ocean, hollering and gurgling as he disappeared beneath the waves. As soon as he reached the water, it became impossible to track him, as the rough waves were each as high as most men were tall anyway. In a moment, it was as if the madman had never existed at all.

[Anonymous No.10347512]

>>10347143
I'm a little drunk right now, so I'll give you an honest critique later, but I have a question. Why write porn? is there money in it, or is that just what you're into? How did you fall into that?

[Anonymous No.10347546]

>>10347143
Drunk impressions, in order:

How does something twist a chiseled face?

Typo: main instead of man.

Yowling seems like an odd word choice.

Drop clearly. To me, the sentence would read better without it. Also, drop, "a foot or two".

Orgiastic? Why not orgasmic? How does one smile during an orgy?

"He kicked and thrashed..." use the person's name. I don't know which man you're talking about here. In general, too many pronouns in this paragraph. It's confusing.

[Anonymous No.10347860]

>>10347512
There's money in it for some. For me, it's mostly just for fun.

>>10347546
>How does one smile during an orgy?
By exercising one's facial muscles, surely.

[Anonymous No.10347962]

>>10347143

Would a half-erotica, half alt-history staring a heavily pregnant Anne Frank interest you?

I've already got the basic plot fleshed out. It does require some knowledge of American history (the plot initially starts out entirely centered on Anne's life in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, but drops hints that a major event in American history went very differently and in fact, set the entire plot of the novel in motion), but it's nothing you couldn't learn from ten minutes on Wikipedia though.

[Anonymous No.10347996]

>>10333520
I was wondering if someone could critique a passage of mine:

"Timothy looked away from for a moment. On the wall behind Mrs. Gleason were an assortment of photographs, mostly of her family. There was also a small cross-stitch of a cat playing with a ball of yarn, the word "Mom" embroidered at the bottom. The name of the cat perhaps? No, Timothy remembered, Mrs. Gleason had children..."

Does the passage seem amusing at all or is it just worded stupidly? The boy in the passage is supposed to have had some brain damage, if that gives it any context.

[Anonymous No.10348030]

I took my time one morning too late
Now its lost It’s gone away
The pierce of the wind kisses my skin
Today was once so far away

The thought of her flushes my face so pale
One day hoped to cloak her with a veil
Rebellious wonders now howl through my mind
She’s a painter and she’s Brandywine

A kiss like fire leaves me with empty desire
The mystery of the lady is now history
Auburn hair lights the room like a flare
Fair-skinned lady uplifts the room I’m crazy

False hope fills the air in the morn
Farewell echoes into my face with scorn
Stabbed through the heart with a silver cane
Parasitic thoughts rush my brain


This is a song I wrote. Just wanting some harsh criticism.

[Anonymous No.10348237]

I've got two with me now and they've both been posted before. Just want to know how they are and which one has better potential to be continued into a full story.

1st one.

[Anonymous No.10348276]

>>10348237
2nd one.

[Anonymous No.10348452]

>>10347996
>Does the passage seem amusing at all or is it just worded stupidly?

Neither. There is a word missing in the first sentence but that's all that struck me as odd. Couldn't say it is interesting or amusing, it's too short.

[Anonymous No.10349223]

This is a short story called 'Surprise'. Feel free to let me know what works, and what doesn't.

[Anonymous No.10350325]

>>10347962

Bump

[Anonymous No.10350442]

>>10348276
>take the hand [of a special someone] on a spin
?

>is not; it's; took; reflected
Awkward tenses. And I don't understand the rest of the paragraph.

I stopped reading there because it read like a 4chan LARPing.

[Anonymous No.10350702]

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire

People carry roses
And make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can't buy her
In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even a pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of match sticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers' nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows rainy
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing


Please critique

[Anonymous No.10351242]

>>10347860

Please respond >>10347962

[Anonymous No.10351262]

>>10351242
I'm the guy he was replying to, but I'm going with a hard, fast, and immediate no.

[Anonymous No.10351284]

>>10351262

What's wrong with pregnant Anne Frank erotica?

It's a woefully underdeveloped genre.

[Anonymous No.10351596]

There’s a girl in my one history course that is a true ghoul. I’d like to think at one point underneath the amateurly applied cosmetics which is barely concealing a now scarred, blotchy face, there may have been an attractive girl once. Her facial skin tone (different from the rest) is vaguely grey as a result. Is frayed, brittle hair a side effect of birth control? I’ll have to ask Clea about that. It seemed to be a nice, natural colour as well. The fake, oversized plastic lashes is unsettling, followed by a somber aftertaste. She seems to have a semblance of self awareness, dressing rather modestly. This is contrasted with a lascivious demeanour combined all too commonly with a slight disregard for cleanliness and hygiene. Her regular baseball cap is usually covered in a light, white undetermined dust. I can only imagine the stack of discharge-stained laundry on her bedroom floor, the containers of several hopeless beauty products lining her shelves, desk, and dressers.

[Anonymous No.10351631]

>>10351596
maybe shes lewd and has halitosis and dandruff bc she was painal-gangbanged by her father and uncles in a sex dungeon

[Anonymous No.10351665]

>>10351631
that's no excuse

[pic unrelated No.10351668]

>>10351631

[Anonymous No.10351673]

>>10351665
youre right, she should lay off the yaz while she at it too

[Anonymous No.10351704]

>>10333586
pls critique

[Anonymous No.10351707]

During the holidays when we sit down to feast
My delicious daddy cuts me off the thickest slice of ham
He holds it up, the morsel quivering between fork and knife
As I hold out my plate to receive the meat treat.

Plop goes the ham, onto the plate.

I stare at the ham, a pink glistening mirror
To the raw, dense fiber of my own heart
I ask myself, will anyone regard me to be so delicious?

I poke my fingers through the ham to make two eyeholes
And wear my meat mask.
I can see everything, but I have no mouth.

[Anonymous No.10351723]

>>10351707
lmao nice

[Anonymous No.10352054]

>>10350702
plz critique

[Anonymous No.10352229]

>>10350702

sounds like a poem written by bethesda writers and put into a ye old book of Skyrim poetry

aka >silence faithful ice fire roses flowers valentines cloak and dagger madams candles horsemen pawn wise men

[Anonymous No.10352256]

Derek exited the bus. This was a normal part of his commute home from work. He looked to his right. The trail of dogs that had been following the bus surrounded him and began humping furiously. This too was a normal part of his commute.

“I’m not letting you on tomorrow,” said the driver.

“It’s not my fault,” said Derek.

Derek began his walk home. The dogs followed him, pausing only to mate with a new partner for a few thrusts. More dogs caught up with the group and entered the orgy.

Derek paused at the edge of his property by the large, wooden privacy fence circling his neighbor’s yard and pulled out a ring of keys. He heard a bang and saw the fence shake as his neighbor’s English Bulldog ran into it at full speed from the other side. He selected the key to his front door and looked down. An impatient-looking boxer crouched low as a dachsund frantically tried to mount it.

Derek leapt over the fornicating dogs and sprinted for his front door. Behind him, he heard yelps and barks as the dogs noticed the disappearance of his sexual aura. Derek slammed the key into the lock, twisted, and jerked the door just wide enough to fit him sideways, stopping only to punt a chihuahua that had gotten too close. He squeezed through and slammed the door shut. Outside, the dogs howled.

Derek dropped to his knees, then lay face-first on the floor. It occurred to him that this might be a good time to cry. He took several quick, shallow breaths, and thought about how unfair it was that every dog in town was either fucking on his lawn or on its way to fuck on his lawn. He thought about how unfair it was that they had followed him from work, where he had watched them fucking in the parking lot through the window from his desk all day. He thought about how unfair it was that they had followed him from his house, after spending all night fucking on his lawn. He thought about how unfair it was that the cycle would continue again tomorrow.

“UNNNNNNGH,” he groaned. “UNNNNNNGH.”

His face was hot against the cold wooden floor. He began to get nauseous, so he stopped.

[Anonymous No.10352294]

>>10352229
So is good or not? Asshole.

[Anonymous No.10352372]

>>10352294
Easy there, grumpy little fella!

Since you are clearly incapable of reading between any lines, let me guide you to your answer with a question. Is Skyrim highly regarded for its poetry?

I'm not the anon who replied originally, but it's not great. Your imagery is confusing and flat (speaks like silence, true like ice/fire, howls like a hammer), and your word choice is bombastic. I fully agree with the anon who originally replied to you. I would expect to find this in a fantasy novel.

Things I did like:

>In the dime stores and bus stations
>People talk of situations
>Read books, repeat quotations

>She knows there's no success like failure
>And that failure's no success at all

>Even a pawn must hold a grudge

Maybe go to Reddit if you're feelings are getting hurt here?

[Anonymous No.10352682]

>>10352294

I would recommend getting in touch with your asshole if you would like to write more effective poetry. Or live more effectively in general.

[Anonymous No.10352891]

>>10333520
I've never really written anything until recently. It's only a small excerpt, so let me know if you have any questions.

[Anonymous No.10352925]

"Love is shameful and unproud. None of us used to love. We fucked, made the offspring fuck. Until we were all fucking. You loved me as a whore loved her job. As a politician loved giving to the people. You're proud of your skin and prosthetic breasts. You fucked me. I didn't love you for fucking me, just like my father and his father before him.

I'd probably fuck you again. It's better than eating tv dinners in front of a cold window and a broken radiator. Sometimes when I think of fucking you, I touch that radiator. Not once since fucking you, however, has that radiator given my hand a warm response.

It's been awhile since I've been downtown. All the blacks nod at me with white faces. It's February, I fucked you on new years. My knuckles are cracking and bleeding all over the page. It's okay, I'm writing in red ink. You told me to write in red ink. I believed you, and wrote everything in red ink.

I signed my name in red ink on that parking ticket I got while I was fucking you. I did the same on the restraining order, and the child support.

The blacks are approaching from that one resturaunt I took you to before I fucked you. We didn't get seats, had no reservations. You said let's eat at my place. I didn't know we'd be eating each other's hearts.

We fucked - did we? As I recall, you fucked me, made me bleed red ink all over your pages. The blacks are a block away with white faces.

Funny, I'm white with a black face."

[Anonymous No.10352965]

>>10352891
I like the overall theme, the scene very completely sets up the conflicts of the story your presenting, so, good job there.

However I would focus a wee bit more on showing the reader what's going on, rather than telling the reader what's going on. Instead of stating Milo's concerns of avoidance ask yourself how you can use the empty chair symbol to demonstrate his fears of avoidance.

For instance,
>Milo was well aware of the fact that that had been his father's chair. However, not once had he recalled ever seeing his father take residence upon it. His mother had plainly laid out his father's utilities, but there had been no father.

Otherwise solid work man, I like the concept of the story and would like to see more of what you're doing with it.

Also, does Milo have a missing limb? I'm wondering if the phantom limb comment is literal or metaphorical.

[Anonymous No.10353188]

>>10352965
Oh wow, thanks!

Yes, Milo is missing his right arm. His father was forced to amputate it in an accident. Also, the chair in the corner is not his father’s but his deceased brother Liam’s. They removed it from the table after he passed because the mother kept accidentally setting a place.

[Anonymous No.10353307]

>>10352372
Fuck you buddy. This poem was written by a nobel prize winner

[Anonymous No.10353317]

>>10353307
>This poem was written by a Nobel prize winner
Wow, literally nothing of value

[Anonymous No.10353318]

>>10333661
Overdone. Don't lay it on so thick, ok? This is that mccarthy pseudodeep style

[Anonymous No.10353324]

>>10335704
7/10

[Anonymous No.10353335]

>>10341886
this is the writing equivalent of trying to make money on mechanical turk.

[Anonymous No.10353344]

>>10342703
I knew it was Tha Real Shit

[Anonymous No.10353353]

>>10343379
this is good. not redeemed by the prose but by the heart in it all. To find heart in a story these days is very rare. Use fewer adverbs. The heart is what's powering this, not the fancy words, complex sentences, or gestures towards philosophy. Focus on the heart!

[Anonymous No.10353358]

>>10343891
thumbs down. uninteresting thoughts and words

[Anonymous No.10353360]

>>10344683
>was quickly procured
passive voice. bich

[Anonymous No.10353375]

>>10347143
wow, this is the best prose I've seen in the whole thread, maybe the best prose I've seen in many threads. There are some weird phrases/words, but nothing that can't easily be polished in post. Athletic, vigorous, forceful, even "classical" kind of style at work here.

However, without context, I can only speak about the prose. I don't know why you write this as if shooting at a rising wave were a rational thing to do, or why you'd want to liken a wave to a person so thoroughly. Is this a sentient wave or something? I need to know more to see if the mechanics underneath it live up to the prose. GJ either way

[Anonymous No.10353380]

>>10351596
anon, this is no way to act!

[Anonymous No.10353418]

https://pastebin.com/E8dCYSnK

[Anonymous No.10353526]

>>10353318
Appreciate the feedback. Yeah, there is definitely some McCarthy in here. I hope it was leavened somewhat by a Barthelme-ish twist of weirdness in the premise/narrator's voice. Not sure I can change that much without fucking up the tone, but I will go back and do some tweaking once the story is done.

[Anonymous No.10353583]

>>10347143
I didn't like the word "even" before the howling gale. It made me go through the list of all the things a bullet could go through, including the professor's skull. I admit you were talking about the bullet's crack rather than the bullet itself, but even if someone were to say "the bullet's crack went through his skull" I'd probably imagine a bullet going through his skull for a moment. On the contrary, "even the howling" sounds nice.

I also read orgiastic as orgasmic the first time. Still some of the best stuff in the thread like the other anon said.

[Anonymous No.10353978]

p a s t e b i n.com/hp9SvrHz

[Anonymous No.10354854]

>>10347143

>tfw porn writer anon still hasn't responded >>10347962

[Anonymous No.10354921]

Y'all seem like snobs of the highest order

[Anonymous No.10354944]

>>10354921
I'd rather learn to write like a snob then whittle away than never reach that point. I figure it's like how you learn to draw realistic images first instead of trying to just work your way up to anime and then stopping there.

[Anonymous No.10354949]

>>10353358
>When Chesterton was right
"Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid...The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact."
>The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death

[Anonymous No.10354973]

>>10354944
I mean a lot of the stuff posted here doesn't have any meaning. It's just written to sound intelligent and like it has some deeper meaning but it doesn't. Don't get me wrong some are alright, but a lot of it is just splattering paint on a wall and calling it art

[Anonymous No.10355066]

>>10352891
this was really good anon, good work

[Anonymous No.10355151]

His head turns to look at me, he has not moved. Face to the painting, mask to me. Searing darkness behind the eyes. We stand in front of a painting, the only one in the room, distant murmurings filter in from other exhibits. A white canvas. No. Subtle structure begins to take shape- hair thin lines- red and ochre intricate.

The mask cracks a smile, loudly. How did I ever think the canvas was blank? That darkness seeps out of the broken porcelain. I keep watch on the painting- lines assembling, no intention or intelligence, but assembling all the same as in my peripheral the darkness shimmers like air from a boiler.

“From the illusion of control we derive control.”

The words shock back the ink and the air is clear again but for a thin keening. The man spoke those words, the walls shouted them. I feel the first bite of a cold- that dreary weight, that heat in your gut.

One hand clasps my shoulder. Avuncular, familiar, wrapped over steel cords. He has not moved. Mask to painting, face to me. Why would he smile? He has no need to comfort me and no desire to gloat. One rock in the riverbed has resisted the water’s wear and will forever. The water flows over it in the same way it always has. He nods and smiles and is not moving. If I could one day learn that trick: to walk while staying perfectly still.

The air fills with music and the hand on my shoulder pushes me sideways, lying down. With a touch I stop the soft bedside chiming.

Today I am going to the museum.

[Anonymous No.10355352]

>>10345927
>>10345951
>>10346044
>>10346115
>rhythm
you mean meter? fucking newfags. rhythm=buzzword

[Anonymous No.10355364]

>>10352891
I have never once read my name in any story, poem, or excerpt

That definitely caught me off guard

[Anonymous No.10355383]

>>10347112
>reading poetry in translation

[Anonymous No.10355391]

>>10352925
this is some gaay angsty alcoholic bullshit. if you're gonna write like a bibber, at least be witty

[Anonymous No.10355406]

>>10354973
"snob" is the wrong word. snob implies a narrow taste cultivated by much selective reading. everyone on this board is nobooks youngfag

[Anonymous No.10355646]

>>10354973
It's kind of peculiar how many people on a board devoted to one of the broadest forms of art seem to be allergic to all but a narrow band of laconic realist prose.

[Anonymous No.10355777]

>>10352891
This is very good, you have talent

[Anonymous No.10355804]

I just submitted an excerpt / short story to a memoir - writing competition. It'll be my debut publication if I win or make the shortlist. Wish me luck :3

[Anonymous No.10355828]

>>10355066
>>10355777
Oh my God, thank you guys. I’ve never tried writing for fun before, but I’ve always wanted to.

[Anonymous No.10356039]

>>10355804
No

[Anonymous No.10356266]

>>10355828
yeah dude, you should stick with it! You managed to say quite a lot with a short little passage. You're word choice was good and helped achieve that deep terseness

[Anonymous No.10356430]

>>10352925
I actually kind of liked it. It's definitely edgy, but I enjoyed reading it and would be interested in seeing where it goes.

[Anonymous No.10356784]

>>10355364
My class read a story called “The Phantom Tollbooth” in the sixth grade where the main character’s name was Milo. It’s been my favorite name to use in anything since then.

[Anonymous No.10356830]

Of love no joy unlike the heartly pause:
It does but grow neath presentient laws
Because of sentiment; O mystrous Love,
Of quivers less sharp, feelings redly wove
By blessed hands of mortal and maidens.

[Anonymous No.10356870]

>>10345762
Watch your tenses. Keep it in the past.

[Anonymous No.10357447]

>>10345525
Who do I send my regards?

[Anonymous No.10357496]

[Anonymous No.10357505]

[Anonymous No.10357511]

This $30 ad coupon is getting me nothing but fake profile views.

[Anonymous No.10357524]

Okay. That was most of my public, thrown-away stuff. (Got sick of waiting 6 + months for publishers, uploaded some).

[Anonymous No.10357612]

>>10335704
7/10

[Anonymous No.10357630]

>>10334967

>10334967

I was into it. Then I hit, "Me, who am I? Am I human?" That's lower than your ideal quality level.

Baldwin's paragraph is weak when it gets to "His throat was like the desert that lie before him," - don't even try comparing those two.

Baldwin? Who is Baldwin? And the following sentences, nah, I'm quitting here. That just makes no sense - he clearly remembers his name and knows it as his name!!

[Anonymous No.10357693]

Man with an egg.

Today I am going to poach this thing.
Boil the water add two drops of vinegar
still the boiling water before it boils
and drop in the broken open egg

watch it turn white and perfect
to eat wobbly on some hard toast.
I think I could eat this thing every day.
Maybe, who knows. There is a lot
of uncertainty to statements like that

until it is the last day, and woken
before breakfast and a stretch
the last memory becomes yesterday
I forgot about breakfast.

[Anonymous No.10357696]

>>10357693
third line, first stanza *stir

[Anonymous No.10357907]

HE’S PAYING RESPECTS

He no longer mourns the body
six feet below him.
His tears are for the stone
grown grubby over the years,
and shriveled wildflowers
and that willow with a diseased
and dragging branch
for every year she’s been gone.

He’s not quite like the crows though.
They celebrate the dead as if it’s life,
sit together on a bough like undertakers,
dark eyes peeled for another corpse to eat.

And nor is he in league
with the old white-bearded man
who drives his mower across the grass
or those two young guys in the distance,
shirtless, wielding spades,
a hole in the world opening up beneath them.
No, he doesn’t show up here
because it’s what he’s paid to do.

Now, he can hardly remember what she looked like.
Her touch has been superseded by everything
from the flannel of pajamas
to a laminated table-top.
Her perfume is now coffee.
Her conversation, the television set.

He does grieve for the angel,
twenty years about to fly
and never once soaring.
And the marble bench,
lovingly dedicated
but too uncomfortable to sit on.

And there’s always himself to bewail, lament:
shackled by duty, beholden to tears,
buried alive
and in the open air of all places.

[Anonymous No.10357957]

>>10335704
uhmm that's a 7/10

[Anonymous No.10357982]

>>10345937
>People don't wink in real life
bitch I do it all the time

[Anonymous No.10357989]

>>10357982
not an argument

[Anonymous No.10358016]

>>10357989
whatever you say *wink*

[Anonymous No.10358081]

>>10353418
more/better:
https://pastebin.com/83AjvPPK

[Anonymous No.10358234]

I feel like my work is the epitome of bad YA and I don't know how I can remedy that. Writing is hard...

Night had fallen on the castle grounds. A light breeze slid along the young man’s body; his muscled frame tingled at the chilly sensation. Sweat trickled down his toned chest and arms. He grabbed his white shirt and covered his body. The fabric has turned frigid from lying on the cold grass and caused his powerful back to shiver once the two made contact. He grasped his olive cloak, turned to the imposing castle’s highest window and immediately disappeared into the night.

Inside the stone fortress, a young woman had been gazing at the stranger. Her fiery red mane glowed in the warming aura of lamplight. Her piercing emerald eyes scrutinized every corner of the dark gardens as she came to the unfortunate conclusion that the strange man had left for the night. The woman clamped her chest in a daze. She leaned on the wall next to the window, resting her petite, yet impressive musculature on the grey marble. Her frantic heartbeat resounded on the castle walls. The young woman felt the entire structure pulsing in tune with her fluttering core.

The mysterious man had undeniable noticed her. Whenever she met his stare, she felt her heart constrict and her stomach churn. The feeling annoyed her so very much. As captain of the Baron’s guards, her task was centered on her ruler’s safeguard. Any distraction was a clear obstacle she had to surmount.

She snuck another peek at the window, but her vivid green gems found naught but quivering leaves and bristling greenery. The courtyard was left emptied of his presence.

[Anonymous No.10358348]

>>10358081
>>10358234
>the similarities at the start
Not that the first is YA. Cliche, but not YA.

>I feel like my work is the epitome of bad YA and I don't know how I can remedy that.
What motive do you think your story is conveying? It's got this "he was a boy, she was a girl" Taylor Swift feel to it. Drama plus wish fulfillment is the heart of YA (although perhaps not in a necessarily heterosexual sense). Present an argument instead of reveling in a fantasy and droning on about characters so directly. Ask yourself why the fuck you're reading while you proofread.

You've got a whole paragraph where all of the sentences start off denoting the character or one of her attributes. Switching from "Her" "She" "The woman" just for variety is stupid. The words do different things. For example, a name is more likely to make me see a face, while a pronoun does less. Make each decision deliberate. Look at the last line:

>The courtyard was left emptied of his presence.
Was he poured out of it or something, like the whole thing was tipped over?

You need flow between your sentences too; it seems like you're just listing things off independently. Take the similar cold-wind thing in the other post. It starts with the crappy pelt around the neck, then says the same kind of pelt was also in the sleeves, then (on account of the texture: this ordering is the slip up in the paragraph) lets the wind blows through, which is used to reveal the surface of the woman inside, who was previously not refereed to with gendered pronouns. Your lines just alternate from midevil to anime to weak cockease arbitrarily.

[Anonymous No.10358444]

>>10358348
I read your points multiple times when it came to what I posted which was >>10358234 but I'm not too sure if I understand what your criticisms are. What is inherently wrong with describing your character in a more direct manner? Also, I understand the fact that words can have different meanings depending on where and how you use them, but in this case "she, her, woman" are just synonyms used to reduce redundancy and sometimes I feel like being concise helps. I don't feel like they bring about any confusion.
In regards to my final line, is it really that bad? For example: The room was left emptied of his presence. Since he's no longer there, I figured it might be a nice way of saying his presence is no longer noted . Maybe devoid is a better choice?

[Anonymous No.10358508]

>>10358444
Devoid would be a better word.

>in this case "she, her, woman" are just synonyms used to reduce redundancy and sometimes I feel like being concise helps. I don't feel like they bring about any confusion.
It isn't confusion they bring about. The problem is the "in this case" mindset. This goes back to the "emptied" thing; in that case it wasn't being used the way my kneejerk interpretation read it, but that doesn't change the fact that my kneejerk interpretation did read it that way.

The pronouns etc aren't confusing in that sense, but they're giving me arbitrary angles. It's like I'm picking up a novel and reading a grocery list, but rather than write out all the fruit, all the breads, and all the dairy I need to buy, the list obnoxiously goes in a cyclical fruit-bread-dairy pattern simply for diversity's sake as though that kept it from being a grocery list.

Contrast "the canine" and "the dog"; what would be the difference between two characters who used these terms? What would be the difference between two authors who used these terms? You can't just use vocabulary for variety as though you were hiring to meet an affirmative action quota without killing your voice entirely. Try writing something like an edgy political rant where you try and dig in with each word. Scrap it afterwards but to remember the process itself more generally.

[Anonymous No.10358596]

>>10358508
Thank you for the feedback, I understand much better now.

[Anonymous No.10359384]

>>10347143

Still reads like a porno desu

[Anonymous No.10359389]

Der letzte Tag, ein Samstag, brach um sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig an, als N.M. klingelte. Sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig: Die Augen unseres Helden, D.F., bewegten sich rapide hinter seinen zugezogenen Lidern, Wasser mag doch jeder, das Klingeln dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong vermochte ihn erst beim dritten - aber nicht letzten - Läuten zu wecken, dummer Hurensohn, dummer Bastard, und er verließ das Bett (lechzte, lechzte, lechzte), noch im Gestern verfangen, das erst um vier Uhr vier erlosch, mit einer Bewegung, einer Rührung, die die allerletzte dieser Art bleiben sollte. Ein Mann wächst nur bis zu einem bestimmten Punkt, das Namensschild an seiner Tür, der Türrahmen. Kleiner Hurensohn, nichtsnutzig, albern. Ein Blick aus dem Fenster, schlagartig wach, als hätte er noch nie geschlafen: Ein grauer VW Polo auf dem Parkplatz - ach was - der Zahnarztpraxis. Dort stand er zuerst im Sommer zweitausendsechzehn, zuletzt vor einem Jahr. Also, sieben Uhr sechsunddreißig, dingdongdingdongdingdongdingdong, kein Vogel war zu hören, öffnete D.F. seinen Schrank, derweil N.M. vor der Tür stand, warum - er wollte ihn ermorden - wusste nur er, allein, einsam, keiner sonst, auch wenn D.F. es hätte wissen müssen; vor 15 Jahren schon, gottloses Stück Scheiße, hätte er es wissen müssen, kétségtelenül. Er trat auf eine Plastikflasche, er war schon angezogen. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Gestern Nacht hat er wunderschön gekotzt, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, mehrmals, immer wieder. Heute Morgen: Nicht einmal Vögel hört man, dingdong dingdong dingdong. Er ging die Treppe runter, wie jeden Tag. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Die Tür ging auf. Er hat wunderschön gekotzt, gestern noch, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, ja, jetzt ist alles dumm, jetzt ist alles blöd, kein Vogelgeschwitzer vernahm er. N.M. stand vor ihm, wie ein Baum, hinter ihm war der Rest, die Sonne fiel auf seinen Nacken, unverändert. Der Rest: Sein Auto, die Straße, die Zahnarztpraxis, weiter rechts das Tanzstudio. Er, N.M., versuchte sein Grinsen - er grinste wie ein Schwertfisch -, wie immer zu unterdrücken, meistens gelang es nicht. --Sag auch, warum du lachst, D.F. fragend, selber lachend, er musste nach oben gucken, seinen Kopf heben, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, sein Rücken tat weh, seit Jahren schon tat er weh, trotzdem hob er seinen Kopf, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, entwürdigend war das, sieben Uhr achtunddreißig war es. Das wusste er nicht, konnte es nicht wissen.
--Hat seine Gründe, immer noch wie ein Schwertfisch.
--Seit wann bist du in S.?
--Seit ... Er schloss seinen Mund, musterte das Vorzimmer, als wäre D.F. nicht anwesend. Sein Lächeln blieb stecken.

[Anonymous No.10359412]

Der letzte Tag, ein Samstag, brach um sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig an, als N.M. klingelte. Sieben Uhr fünfunddreißig: Die Augen unseres Helden, D.F., bewegten sich rapide hinter seinen zugezogenen Lidern, Wasser mag doch jeder, das Klingeln dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong dingdongdingdong vermochte ihn erst beim dritten - aber nicht letzten - Läuten zu wecken, dummer Hurensohn, dummer Bastard, und er verließ das Bett (lechzte, lechzte, lechzte), noch im Gestern verfangen, das erst um vier Uhr vier erlosch, mit einer Bewegung, einer Rührung, die die allerletzte dieser Art bleiben sollte. Ein Mann wächst nur bis zu einem bestimmten Punkt, das Namensschild an seiner Tür, der Türrahmen. Kleiner Hurensohn, nichtsnutzig, albern. Ein Blick aus dem Fenster, schlagartig wach, als hätte er noch nie geschlafen: Ein grauer VW Polo auf dem Parkplatz - ach was - der Zahnarztpraxis. Dort stand er zuerst im Sommer zweitausendsechzehn, zuletzt vor einem Jahr. Also, sieben Uhr sechsunddreißig, dingdongdingdongdingdongdingdong, kein Vogel war zu hören, öffnete D.F. seinen Schrank, derweil N.M. vor der Tür stand, warum - er wollte ihn ermorden - wusste nur er, allein, einsam, keiner sonst, auch wenn D.F. es hätte wissen müssen; vor 15 Jahren schon, gottloses Stück Scheiße, hätte er es wissen müssen, kétségtelenül. Er trat auf eine Plastikflasche, er war schon angezogen. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Gestern Nacht hat er wunderschön gekotzt, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, mehrmals, immer wieder. Heute Morgen: Nicht einmal Vögel hört man, dingdong dingdong dingdong. Er ging die Treppe runter, wie jeden Tag. Sieben Uhr siebenunddreißig. Die Tür ging auf. Er hat wunderschön gekotzt, gestern noch, ist auf seinen Magen gefallen, ja, jetzt ist alles dumm, jetzt ist alles blöd, kein Vogelgeschwitzer vernahm er. N.M. stand vor ihm, wie ein Baum, hinter ihm war der Rest, die Sonne fiel auf seinen Nacken, unverändert. Der Rest: Sein Auto, die Straße, die Zahnarztpraxis, weiter rechts das Tanzstudio. Er, N.M., versuchte sein Grinsen - er grinste wie ein Schwertfisch -, wie immer zu unterdrücken, meistens gelang es nicht. --Sag auch, warum du lachst, D.F. fragend, selber lachend, er musste nach oben gucken, seinen Kopf heben, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, sein Rücken tat weh, seit Jahren schon tat er weh, trotzdem hob er seinen Kopf, um in sein Gesicht zu gucken, entwürdigend war das, sieben Uhr achtunddreißig war es. Das wusste er nicht, konnte es nicht wissen.
--Hat seine Gründe, immer noch wie ein Schwertfisch.
--Seit wann bist du in S.?
--Seit ... Er schloss seinen Mund, musterte das Vorzimmer, als wäre D.F. nicht anwesend. Sein Lächeln verklebte, schmierig, blieb stecken, sollte für immer stecken bleiben, während, etwas später, D.F. nie wieder lächeln sollte, kein weiteres Mal, und auch das Gegenteil nicht.
~fin

[Anonymous No.10359419]

>>10359412
No comprendo.

[Anonymous No.10359714]

"When was the last time you actually meant it?" she whispers.

Pete fidgets in his chair.

“When I meant what?"

"That you meant it when you were with a woman,"

That quality about Barb grips Pete Monaghan- that she is a keeper of secrets and that she, too, has an iron fortress in her. He had seen her before, leaving as he was coming in, but never made up as she was this morning. It dawns on him that she knew his name- how?

Could he really tell her the truth?

He fishes for the night- it really did happen but who can tell how long ago it was…

“Ah--” he stalls.

The back of a Mercury Sable. There was a dancing girl at the place before the interstate and she always used to do that thing with her legs when they played Mony Mony. She would fall back and look off into the distance and wind her legs around, out and down and over. Yet never spread them all the way somehow. She flipped onto her belly and arched her back like a cat and she looked at him, this look that paralyzed him. And he sat there in it, immobile in his chair and frightened and hot and impotent. He didn't have to pay her. He chatted her up and she asked him to show her around town. She was brand new, she’d never been here before.

The wondrous, alchemical thing that happened when their eyes locked made him believe in something outside of himself. He believed for months that it was that thing that happened to people who fall in love-- that was what had happened. Where did she go?

"I don't remember," he says.

[Anonymous No.10359814]

>>10359714
Sentences too long and I found it pretty confusing. Maybe additional information that we've changed time/place would help

[Anonymous No.10360242]

>>10359714
I didn't like the namedrop

>He had seen her before, leaving as he
Jarring because it sounds like he was the one leaving before you hit the pronoun

>Yet never spread them all the way somehow.
unless the subject is a man named Yet, that's a sentence fragment

you have some ands that might perform better if they where replaced with while or as, but in most cases the repetition is good; it's more like the repetition of the repetition that's bothering me

>She flipped onto her belly and arched her back like a cat and she looked at him, this look that paralyzed him.
the end really hangs out, you could put a with after the comma or do something better than that

[Anonymous No.10360312]

>>10359714

caught my attention at first, dialog portion works well, lost my attention in the large paragraph, last paragraph not exactly a winner either

pretty good overall

[Anonymous No.10360425]

>>10335690
Is this better? Maybe not much, but a little? Read this first if you haven't seen the previous:

Kafekaesqueish:

In his hand, he holds out a handful of beetles. I’d first mistook them for pebbles. I ask him what he's doing and he says to me, uh, not much really, just gonna eat these beetles. He poured them all into his mouth, shoveling with his hand, and I was like man, you sure ate those beetles, and he was like, yeah, that I did. We went our separate ways. To this day, I still think about the day I saw a man eat a handful of beetles.

[Anonymous No.10360480]

>>10360425
or maybe:

Very Kafekaesqueish:

In his hand, he holds out a handful of beetles, very Kafekaesqueishlike. I’d first mistook them for pebbles. I ask him what he's doing and he says to me, uh, not much really, just gonna eat these beetles. He poured them all into his mouth, shoveling with his hand, and I was like man, you sure ate those beetles, and he was like, yeah, that I did. We went our separate ways. To this day, I still think about the day I saw a man eat a handful of beetles.

[Anonymous No.10360485]

>>10360425

>In his hand, he holds out a handful of pebbles. No, I'm mistaken, his hand is full of beetles.

Starting with the beetles and referencing an earlier mistaking for pebbles doesn't meaningfully add to the bizarre feeling of the scene in this format, it's just mentally tedious.

Start with the pebbles, move organically to the realization that they're beetles, as if following a real person's train of thought.

[Anonymous No.10360500]

>>10360485
the joke is to be tedious, but if the humor wasn't conveyed then I did fuck up somewhere

[Anonymous No.10360511]

>>10360500
Stop being such a fucking pseudo then

[Anonymous No.10360517]

>>10360500
The joke is that it's tedious? Is this some Dane Cook branching out shit or what?

[Anonymous No.10360539]

>>10360500

It's not entertainingly tedious, and if your tedium is not entertaining, it isn't a joke.

[Anonymous No.10360696]

The tropic palms stood subject to a mid-night frame. A psalm to the cold solitude ofthe November night fronds sway in that wind, changed directions and swayed again. Frayed and red-tipped leaves hung overhead in long strands dripping drops of that November night's water. From the nearby university a party could be heard. A party could be heard emerging from the air full of wind and palms and frond psalms. It was always on nights like these that it would hit again. That black hole in my stomach that sucked it all up inside of it and spat it back out. All I was was what that black hole would spit out, the leftover remains ofwhat was there before, before it would hit again. AndI would take a phrase or word and repeat it again and again until it went away and all I was was what it would spit out. That black hole combatted only by a repeated "fuck" or "it's okay". It always was okay because I could live off what remains that black hole would spit, and I was a little emptier everytime and I was a little colder everytime but it was always okay. And my heart would be frozen over a little bit more to bite out a stomachache, but it was always okay. I could nevermind that evil stature when my heart was cold and frozen over. The thaw had to come thawing it and when it thawed it wouldnt be hollow but it would be full. And the party wouldnt open up that hole anymore and it would never hit again and thats why I could repeat "it's okay" over cause it was true, and cause it was true the black hole would go away before it hit again.

[Anonymous No.10360758]

I assume that a publisher/agent only wants to pick up someone who will continuously write books, is that true?
I'd like to know in the rare chance anyone, let alone a professional, would like the shit I wrote

why is a person's writing always bad?

[Anonymous No.10360791]

>>10358348
What does YA mean fella?

[Anonymous No.10360798]

>>10360791
Young Adult

[Anonymous No.10360799]

test

[Anonymous No.10360890]

>>10360791
Young adult. Or if you're being facetious and challenging my usage, I usually just try and accept whatever age range the person I'm speaking with is using for it. The term isn't nailed down very well. It's just used to describe things like harry potter, usually negatively here. I guess being edgy like the first post I'd quoted doesn't make your work inherently better than YA, but it prevents it from being something you'd see in the young adult section of a bookstore, so it wouldn't make complete sense to call it that.

[Anonymous No.10360893]

>>10360890
Adult Fantasy for your edgy needs.

[Anonymous No.10360897]

>>10360893
I see
thank you for the borger anon

[Anonymous No.10361027]

>>10360242
>>10359814
>>10360312

Thank you all for your feedback. The worst thing in the world is hearing "It was good, I liked it"

[Anonymous No.10361141]

>>10359714
>where did she go?
>i dont remember
this time skip with the dialogue snapping the protag back into the present is great. well done, I didnt find it confusing at all I dont know what that other anon was talking about.

[Anonymous No.10361155]

I have seen the faces, monsieur
I have, I have, I have
Have seen them melting in the sun like a chocolate homunculous
Oui, I have, monsieur

[Anonymous No.10361167]

>>10361027

https://pastebin.com/QTKdNMRi

I would like to pastebin the first draft of my story here as a thank you to the various denizens of /crit/ because this story would not be possible without all of you. I intend to self-publish this story after more polishing but in the highly unlikely event it is received well, I would like /crit/ to have a share of the credit. Thank you all. I will continue to lurk and offer criticism on your writing. Thank you all and good luck in all of your projects.

[Anonymous No.10361175]

>>10361167
It was good, I liked it

[Anonymous No.10361176]

>>10347143

Plz respond >>10347962

I'll post preggo Anne Frank porn to motivate you if you want.

[Anonymous No.10361205]

>>10361176
The fuck wrong with you

[Anonymous No.10361210]

>>10361175

I expected nothing less. Stay cheeky.

[Anonymous No.10361271]

>>10361205

I just want people to like me.

[Anonymous No.10361282]

>>10361271
You may want it, but you don't deserve it, and I guarantee you that your family is severely disappointed in you.

[Anonymous No.10361304]

>>10347962

[Anonymous No.10361561]

penis

[Anonymous No.10361612]

no u

- sad boys and the rest

[Anonymous No.10363117]

>>10358081
https://pastebin.com/2CtS0XR1

[Anonymous No.10363745]

>>10361304

Jeff would probably get butthurt at this story because it involves some very "politically incorrect" heroes

[Anonymous No.10363902]

>>10361304

My longest I Love You Jesus Christ ever.

[Anonymous No.10364644]

I stared at the TV at the foot of our bed, tuned to a dead channel. Static whirled round the screen like snow and ash. Slowly, symbols began to appear behind the static and the hissing that once filled the air began to take the shape of commands. The symbols made my eyes roll like a horse about to bolt and the hissing made my ears bleed. However I knew the necessity of my task and quietly left my sleeping wife in bed. I walked out of the bedroom down the stairs, at the bottom of which was a mirror. I saw my repulsive form come into focus in the mirror. As the years had piled on so had my weight and so my stomach had become bloated. the sweat stained vest and unflattering boxers did not help. My hair was thinning and my hair line was receding. I felt like I was wearing a suit of meat slowly rotting around me. Bile rose up in my throat but I swallowed it back down. I had swallowed the same bile every day for past 10 years and could do it one more day before I shed this skin. I entered the kitchen and grasped a reasonably sized meat cleaver. I ran it across my palm so as to be sure it would cut cleanly. sure enough it draw a thin line of blood. the tiled kitchen floor burned against my foot as I stood staring at the red beads bubble out of my hand. eventually my legs began to drag me upstairs as the hiss called out to me. my bones creaked as i lumbered up the stairs indicating the necessity of what must occur. as I neared the room the hiss increased in intensity and my vision began to swim in snow and ash. the door silently swung open and dragged my body into the room. the quilt protecting my wife had fallen off the bed and now she lay exposed in a white nighty. I stood staring at her form from the foot of the bed my shadow playing on the wall in the ecstasy of static. symbols burned into my eyes and slowly the machete rose up and then fell into her stomach, cutting a neat line in her abdomen. She began to convulse and I then climbed on top of her and the machete drew a neat line on her throat deep enough that only a fold of skin at the back held her head to her neck. I felt her slowly begin to stop moving but I could not see anymore for the world had receded entirely behind static. The hissing had drowned everything else out now. left deaf and blind, I dropped the machete and dipped my hands into a her throat and abdomen. using the blood, I began to paint the sheets with the symbols made of static round her body. after that I pulled the the quilt over and once more stood at the foot of the bed. the static began to fade and my vision was slowly restored. the hissing moving from my ears emanated from the bed sheet. as the slurry of snow and ash painted the walls and bed, my shadow blackened her form under the quilt. this quilt had begun to dance as the static began to chant through a torn throat.

[Anonymous No.10364649]

I dangled on my feet like a corpse from a noose as I observed the scene with a neutral expression. the sheets were now moving quite animatedly as though it was being controlled by a puppet master. I believe it was at this point I bit my tongue. blood filled my mouth quickly as though a dam had burst. it rushed out my agape jaw and spilled onto the carpet at my feet. the machete had also fallen out of my grip at some point. the puppet master moved from the sheets to me and dragged me under the now the empty sheets that drowned me in blood.

This is my first attempt at horror. Pls be kind. Also I'm aware the grammar is poor, I just churned it out on my phone tonight.

[Anonymous No.10364712]

Litter Bullstrap wandered about the tricorner testament to atheistic paganistic tictactic procedurings known as finlandia, or Sweden Adjecent. Himself a real God-Spurner, he felt it necessary to tip the scales in favor of this perilous dragon (though besides, the ceremony really was slobbering along as some shot-up Cerberus; time's no master of those who refuse its presents)...

Regardless, to paraphrase Ben Franklin's purported adherence to a clock's unforgiving rubato...'O lazy bones'?

Books, the infernal soul-catchers, its symbiont the ill-gotten Reader, doomed to regurgitating someone else's thoughts, in this eternal teleprompter where a guy's eyes might be caverns adorned beneath shorn eyebrows and seared flesh. He might Moan and Groan and Wail but these noises don't 'mean nothing without interpretation. Dear Readers, prisoners of motheaten cloth and termite infested white wood....

Litter convulsed with each footfall across the broadened avenue, losing his path as completely as a sub resurfacing in a boyhood pond; between epidermal gloves he clutched a right piece of Parchment, emblazened with a declaration of worth one might only find on their mother's fridge, hastily scrawled.
Amazon's #12 author awaited real power, O, belly of yellow, skin smooth as silk! But Litter walked deliberately, a middlebrow stalking his steps, another's lifetime resting easy in his palm.

With two lurching approaches, a coniferous-shaped figure with wooden membrane and coif slid the Parchment easily from within Litter's tight grasp and replaced it with a mimicry so spectacular, it would surely be met with cries of 'whom?'. Aren't the finest results always?

The real victor watches easily from atop his rusted coffee table; his eyes squint, his mustache quivers...perhaps the future in writing lies dormant in the reader, not the writer, not the sulking deliverer of sounds and words, this hopeless architect of cohesion. he is forced to reason! and this is his song

CARLOS CARLOS CARLOS CARLOS we were not meant all to be great the individual will suffer as the collective surges isn't that what the idol worshipers salivate about CARLOS CARLOS

[Anonymous No.10365318]

First chapter of a novella, possibly novel, I started this summer. Doesn't give away much with regards to plot, but would appreciate critiques on style, dialogue, etc.

https://pastebin.com/66VZMuHb

[Anonymous No.10365336]

>>10365318
>compiling and preparing
pick one

[Anonymous No.10365340]

It's funny when you wake up in the morning, I think. Your mind races to countless thoughts and ideas that slowly flood your mind as conciousness meets you. Perhaps you had a wonderful dream, perhaps some terrible nightmare that shook you in the night. The last thing that would ever hit you, though, is the realization of expiration dates. I don't mean this in the sense that you'd find in a grocery story, but rather in life in general. We are all born with expiration dates. In October of 2017 most people shared the same one. It was several weeks out, now, and racing towards them ever faster. The news of it hadn't hit yet, but there was a gut feeling in everyone. Call it a case of introspection hitting globally and in unison. The entire globe, it seemed, had retired momentarily into oneness, into singularity of the self. It lasted only a day, but it was a beautiful day.
People called off work, refused to leave their house, and simply contemplated it all. There was no making up, there were no apologies, there were no arguements or debates or any other sort of conflict; There was only calmness.
And of all the beauty going on in the world at that moment, a man named Tom felt it too. He wasn't a special man, not excessively intelligence, artistic, or special; On the contrary, he was just an average, if not less than, person. He had grown in relative innocence most his life, surrounded by modest wealth and joy. That had shattered later on as he become a young adult and he had secluded himself. He had on occausions found love and joy during this time, but had lost it as quick as he had found it. None of that really mattered though.
Tom was a sad man, though on the outside it seemed quite the opposite. He would build himself up and find a way to go through life only to be beaten down over some simple off-handed remark. Each time he found himself staring into the mirror. His eyes were big and brown and, as he berated himself as foolish, hopless, and unlovable, he watched them die. It had become a routine, one he adopted when he was a younger man, and it seemed to calm him. Perhaps it was just making him colder, but he felt better at the end of the day nonetheless.

[Anonymous No.10365368]

>>10365336
>t
felt like compiling's connotation was more "to create," while preparing's was more "to rehearse/go over." I imagined both took place.

Does seem cluttered, though. Thanks!

[Anonymous No.10365713]

A shot poem I finished today and think is perfect.

[Anonymous No.10365732]

>>10365713
Its not

[Anonymous No.10366407]

Well, I tried writing mine like a Light Novel.
How is it?

[Anonymous No.10366811]

If anyplace in Christendom needed a miracle right now, it was Tuscany. The war-torn countryside stretched far and wide, a patchwork of gloom stitched with blackened cypress trees .
Five days had passed since the army came through and Niccolo could still smell the smoke they left behind.
A priest, a bodyguard, and a priest-to-be, all riding steeds down a muddy excuse of a road.
Just then Niccolo realized the bodyguard’s wheezy breaths had faded to the patter of rain. He turned in his saddle and felt his heart sink. In his smooth bass he asked, “Have you seen Rinaldo?”
Young Pierro tugged on his reins. “Not lately,” he said in a reedy voice. He glanced left to right, whipping his chestnut hair with each flick of the chin. Something in the distance made him drop his jaw .
Niccolo followed Pierro’s eyes and felt his own scalp prickle. Not far off , right by a boarded-up farmhouse, there stood a riderless horse.
Rinaldo’s horse.
“Maybe he’s… you know.” Pierro twisted his pimply face. “Answering a call of nature.”
“He would’ve told us. ” Marauders crossed Niccolo’s mind, that class of people who’d rob two clergymen once they’d taken care of the muscle . Niccolo’s blood ran cold when he saw someone move behind a shuttered window. Someone with the same brawn and beard as Rinaldo.
Niccolo decided to trust his eyes, timeworn though they were. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted over the storm, “Rinaldo! What in heaven’s name are you doing?!”
A moment’s pause. Something crashed indoors. The door creaked open.
Out strode Rinaldo gripping a bottle in each hand. He raised one aloft, amber fluid sloshing up to the rim. “Worry not! There’s enough here for us all!”
Pierro burst into a fit of laughter that stoked Niccolo’s fury. Yanking on his reins, he dashed through the mud in the hopes that some of it would splash the smile off his apprentice’s face. His horse skidded to a stop within throttling range of Rinaldo.
“Put those back where you found them!” Niccolo speared a finger at the farmstead. “The Church sent us here to confirm a miracle, not to commit crimes."
“Even if the crime is victimless? The folks who owned these are long gone.” Rinaldo shook the bottles and gave a gap-toothed grin. “Unless it’s ghosts you fear?”

“G-ghosts?” By then Pierro had caught up with them, his gloved hands fiddling with the reins. He seemed as quick to laugh at mishaps as he was to jump at superstitions
.
“Feh, ghosts.” Niccolo said sourly. Seldom did he credit such nonsense. Instead he sought natural explanations for “supernatural” phenomena. Such thinking made him one of the best advocatus diaboli in the Church - or so he liked to believe. He narrowed his eyes at Rinaldo. “I will not ask twice. If you want your second half of payment, you’ll do as I say. ”

[Anonymous No.10366814]

>>10366811
Time slowed to a standstill. Rinaldo could take that payment through force if he so desired - that much Niccolo knew. Judging from the way Rinaldo patted his swordbelt, he knew it too. At last he said, “It’s cat piss anyway” and went back inside.
Relief washed over Niccolo but he tried to ignore it. To Pierro he said, “Let’s get back on the road. We’ll need to hurry if we’re to arrive at Melzo before sundown.”
Melzo, the site of a miracle.
Or so they say .

[Anonymous No.10367502]

>>10365318
>https://pastebin.com/66VZMuHb

I think this reads a little stilted. As if you are trying to enforce a certain style. Every now and then you seem to loosen a little, though, like in the first parts of dialogue. Baybe you should let it flow a little more.

Here's mine:
This was not digging a hole, it was a competition, a fight, a battle of man versus earth. Or rock, rather. The soil was hard and loamy here, and suffused with small and large stones. A stubborn slab of ground, packed tight with decades, centuries perhaps, of unperturbed privacy. For the past twenty minutes he had tried to pry loose a large stone but the damn thing was — well, it was firm as rock. The shovel blade came mechanically down, struck and heaved. Repeat that a hundred and twenty times and win the battle. Or that was, at any rate, what he had averaged during the digging of the first three holes in the weeks before. Of course he could have let it be and just started a new hole two yards next to this one. But for one thing, chances were that there would be just another rock waiting for him twenty inches below the surface and for another, he wouldn’t let a damn stone dictate him where to dig his holes.
He thrust the shovel into the mound of excavated soil beside the pit and wiped his hands on his jeans. With stiff fingers he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and wiped his wet, gleaming forehead with it. The sun was just passing the zenith and why he hadn’t come two hours earlier and avoided the worst heat of the day he didn’t know. He thought of his uncle who had toiled at the ironworks for thirty years, eight hours a day or more, right next to the blast furnace where it was so hot you had to wear a heat-resistant suit all day and the damn thing nearly suffocated you. I would’ve jumped in the smelter after a week, he thought to himself, shaking his head at the thought of it. He flung his shirt over a branch protruding from a nearby tree and went back to work, picking up where he’d left off, at sixty-eight cuts.
He had no watch with him, so in terms of time he didn’t know how long it had taken him in the end, but his average got pretty much confirmed. At a hundred and forty-nine he stopped and decided that the hole was done. For a minute he stood and looked at his work, his hands pressed into the small of his back, his mouth hanging half open. The big stone lay soiled and bone-colored beside the cavity, like the cadaver of some overcome enemy rotting honorlessly under the open sky. Already he could feel the sunburn on his shoulders in spite of the shade cast by the high birches and aspen around. The fucking ozone hole. A hundred years from now people would probably have to spend their whole pathetic lives under a roof of some kind if they didn’t want to get burned like ants under a magnifier. He propped the shovel against one of the trees and set off.

[Anonymous No.10367519]

And, with its own self-contented, peace eternal reigned supreme.
Suddenly, a dot starts moving - the primeval, lonely Other...
It becomes the father potent, of the void it makes the mother.
Weaker than a drop of water, this small dot that moves and bounds
Is the unrestricted ruler of the world's unbounded bounds.
Ever since the vasty dimness has been splitting slice by slice,
Ever since come into being earth, sun, moon, light, heat, and ice.
Ever since up to the present gallaxies of planets lost
Follow up mysterious courses, chaos-bred and chaos-tossed,
And in endlessness begotten, endless swarms of light are thronging
Towards life, for ever driven by an infinite of longing;
And in this great world, we, children of a world grotesquely small,
Raise upon our tiny planet anthills to o'ertop the All,
Lilliputian kings and peoples, soldiers, unread, erudite,
We engender generations, reckoning ourselves full bright!
One-day moths upon a mudball measeurable with the chip,
We rotate in the great vastness and forget 'twixt cup and lip
That this world is really nothing but a moment caught in light,
That behind, or else before it, all that one can see is night.
Just like whirls of dust and powder thousands of live granules play
In a glorious ray's dominion and pass over with the ray.
Thus against the never-failing night of time without a bound,
The spontaneous ray, the moment, still fails not to go the round;
When it dies, all dies - like shadows melting in the murky distance
For the universe chimeric is a dream of non-existence.

[Anonymous No.10367544]

>>10367502
Thanks for the input. I liked yours quite a lot, first paragraph's imagery and syntax is great.

The second paragraph could maybe use one or two short/abrupt sentences to break up the wall of text, or even just break one of them into two.
ex. "The sun was just passing the Zenith. Why he hadn't come two hours earlier..."

Would want to read more of this, if it exists.

[Anonymous No.10367547]

>>10365713
Why include all of the facebook shit then cross it our when you could just post the poem on its own? Do you write straight into the webpage?

[Anonymous No.10367564]

>>10360539
Isn't a failed joke still a joke? Asking for an analytic philosopher

[Anonymous No.10367578]

>>10367502
>I would’ve jumped in the smelter after a week, he thought to himself, shaking his head at the thought of it

"at the thought of it" is redundant, cut it

[Anonymous No.10367600]

>>10367578
shit you're right. I read this passage at least six times and missed it. Thanks.

>>10367544
Thanks, man. I'm 25000 words in, so I'd be posting for a long time. I'll think about the breaks, even though I'm afraid it might become clumsy.

About your piece: I find it a little hard to put my finger on what bugs me. I think you're style is quite good, but tedious. Maybe it's the "show don't tell" doctrine that applies to your piece.

[Anonymous No.10367798]

>>10343810
Keep in mind that your narration, when you're writing in this kind of scientific-esque report style that Lovecraft employed, has to come from a source. That specific source, be it a journalist investigating after the story occurs or the protagonist of the story, has access to some facts about the story and not others. In this excerpt, you start from the point of view of an outsider looking into the story, then shift in stages to the much more personal and detailed perspective of the protagonist. That doesn't really work. It's jarring and can take the reader out of the story. I lost interest right about at "...finding himself fortunate little rain befell him..." I think if you want to write mostly from the protagonist's perspective you need to also start from that perspective.

There are a number of small grammar and sentence structure mistakes, but that's not a big deal. The other major problem with this excerpt is that the imagery is not evocative of an actual image. For instance, "Fauna made itself present in sound" could be expanded into 2 or 3 separate sounds, named by animal. This would give the reader a firm sense of what the "fauna" sounds like, rather than forcing the reader to imagine too much on their own in a very short window of time.

Anyway, the fact that I'm willing to critique this this much means I think it has promise. I personally was much more interested in the more journalistic perspective that the story started with than the personal perspective of the narrator. It needs a lot of work though.

[Anonymous No.10367818]

>>10333586
Reupload

[Anonymous No.10368210]

>>10367547

It's just a dumb signature thing I do.

[Anonymous No.10368224]

>>10365732

It is.

[Anonymous No.10368500]

>>10361167
top stuff man, like Carver for the new century. keep it up!

[Anonymous No.10368513]

>>10367798
dang this is some of the most useful constructive criticism i've seen in a minute.

[Anonymous No.10368529]

[Anonymous No.10368883]

Whisker on-a wicker; tisker on-a ticker; an Essky Mo-reau on-a train. Four passengers wore fancy shirts and pants with sparkling beads fastened to their fringes with needles and threads by nearsighted men whose children stood barefoot in the poor grass and leant against the afternoon hitch in the fence until father’s carriage trot was there then they tackled a shin so they rode with his steps to the house. Bisquer on-a bicker.
“If Janey’s cat were to scratch me?” began the older beadwearer Pope with-a Pipe who lived alone in the wilderness for a while and carved his former name into the trees after shaving his head and making an oath which was ultimately neither kept nor broken, “I’d ask for morphine.”
She laughed as she held onto Laurence and stroked his white fur because the feeling sent her away to dance inside the linen drapes which hung in the room where she lost her first tooth an’d sat in a satin gown while staring in her second mirror as tears grew above her blush and a pearly comb lacquer lifted up her hair.
“Surely the wound wouldn’t be that severe,” she offered, “and besides, he’s really too docile for the whole attacking business, I swear it.”
“But Princess,” the younger Tynes interjected, feeling left behind the conversation as he usually did having barely learned to read before becoming a soldier who never fought because one morning he was told to go home and his heart betrayed his eyes and was glad at the news, “it’s often those who try and appear to be the most docile who are actually the most dangerous, just as it’s often those who try and appear to be the most helpful who are actually the most selfish deep down.”
“Sounds as though somebody may’ve tricked you,” Janey conferred while smiling instead at the second smoker named Lowell who used to carry around as many spiked-breath tramp stories as an innstool could support with one half carefully invented and another taken from remote times before he’d grown thorns.
“Everybody’s been misled at some point or another,” Tynes deferred, “I’ll admit it though; luck can be tough, but more so for a Scot like me.”
“Odgymilk!” she laughed, “you think you Scots are sore when we Irish walk alongsidey; crawl, rather?”
“The lad didn’t know you came from bay-by Wicklow,” Lowell puffed, “but doesn’t he now know every bit of Ireland he needs to keep away? how the island revels in its misery as if it were proud? how the millers’ and the farmers’ and fishermen’s wives will eagerly roll in the mud? how every farthing earned is a foothold lost? and don’t ever return to Scotland, where things are much the same.”
“I won’t no matter what. Shipton-under-Wychwood is where I intend on setting stay,” Tynes announced, “not at all far from Oxford and near my second cousins.”

[Anonymous No.10368888]

>>10368883
Gelato-upon-silver arrived and Essky Moreau watched as they ate and she wondered that maybe they belonged to an obscure ilke of pilgrim and had long been riding trains or intermediate ships from a far off land their clothing matched, or that maybe they were an act; a swordswallowing curiosity sent from township to township by a portly handler who wept on his own in his room there in Newham whenever he clutched a rosy memory of his mother but would set his bullwhip to a lion in one moment before swilling watery gin with his midget bride in the next.
“If you set dessert to music, made an opera of it perhaps,” Janey interrupted, “would gelato be the tenor or soprano?”
“It would well melt in that crowded room before making a sound,” the Pope proposed. “And you know,” he continued over his fork, “it makes me laugh that such a question might find its way spoken, and when you think of a word’s fashioning then its path through apprehension, you could verily consider it a miracle; a wonderful thing out of somewhere and nowhere at once.”
“You can’t have me believe you’ve never touched a woman when you speak like that,” she purred.
“Talking is one thing,” Lowell mumbled through a mouthful of cake. “And what’s another?” she cued up, smiling.
He didn’t answer and Essky Moreau thought of ways to help her ear that wouldn’t be noticed; she could tip over her glass and ask an attendant as he knelt down with his rag if she might sit in the empty booth between them without a stain on its tablecloth or she could walk to the toilet and take the booth behind them afterward but in doing so she’d be leaving her drink which may or may not’ve become a draw all its own. Masker on-a macker.
When her head was smaller she’d press it on her wall and listen to her parents’ arguments and tire and fall asleep against it before being woken up by a rashion of yelling; she’d lie on her stomach and peek under stalls in the washroom ‘til she was found and whipped and she’d take her father’s spyglass out for the aging neighbor who’d stoop down to the flowering weeds in her garden and treat them as if they were tulips and would wave at the girly who watched from a perch in a window, and whose kindness was a symptom of frailty.
Her guest Essky Moreau once sat on the knee of her old husband who kicked his quail dogs when he was strong enough to hunt by himself and smelled like tobacco singe as she stooped and primmed. “If you so much as breathe on that flowerbed,” he whispered, “she’ll break into a fit.”
Quietly, he chuckled to himself as she ran over and trampled the bed but his wife screamed then sobbed into her pillow for the rest of the day and the child brought daffodils to their stoop but was turned away at the door and it slammed so that father’s spyglass needed dusting thereafter.

[Anonymous No.10368891]

>>10368888
She upset her glass of red with a finger and it poured across the white cloth and dripped off its edge very slowly. Nobody rushed over as she’d forseen so she turned and saw that there wasn’t an attendant behind her either and that she and the four were the only to the car aside from a man who slept perfectly up-right and snored under his downtilted cap. She thought about finding the fellow who’d brought out their platters so she took from her booth and stepped into the night which smelled like smoke and the wind pinched her cheek and her breath flew between the heavy exit of the first car and the entrance of the second which by then was much heavier.
Two men set their tired elbows to the polished wood with pints of foamy swig that gave off sweat down cloudy grooves and drained out mark-by-mark; the bartender and attendant talked on the other side. Essky Moreau saw him but instead of causing a disturbance she decided to walk past toward the toilet.
“Hello!” whistled the first man, who was born in Brighton and wrote melancholy poems about rain and willows in the margins of his bills while travelling the countryside selling vials of dyed beet juice from a briefcase. “Hell-o cottontail!” he lulled.
The second man; serious; nabbed him at the shoulder which in an instant brought them close to laughter because in spite of their being strangers when the evening had begun they’d many senses for the same as they were both public servants.
He spoke with his eyes, which’d seen a great number of women from the distant corners of the continent to the stately affairs of paltry royals and were therefore carefully attuned to the duh-tails of ethnic character; ‘you fool, she’s French; can’t you tell by the nose?’
“Salut!” he hooted. She’d taken the front and was out and the four men held different troubles underneath their laughter.
The bartender, whose name was Leonyid and who came from the moutains near Tata, had hidden with his father below the deck of a liner to Portsmouth as a boy and after arriving nearly fell to fever but returned later and at one sunrise’d marched from his family’s home an’d snapped the neck of the loudest cock in the village. He hardly laughed at all and wonned in the mug he was buffing with his rag but he had to see her as she passed and he allowed himself to imagine how easily her husband slept which led to thoughts of his own lagging marriage and how he rolled ever further in the ironworked engine from his blubbery milkmaid Zsuzsanna.

[Anonymous No.10368896]

>>10368891
4/4
The attendant; the first to smile at the scene was named Lawrence and was ashamed to’ve come from Hackney where he’d stolen coal until he ran and cried into his mother’s bosom after staring at a stabbed thief who bled and gulped like a fish and spat up clots of fluid in an alley strewn with rubbish. He threw back his head, cinched shut his eyes and smacked his chest with his palm as he laughed and recalled the tatties who’d stray into the city with the ruffians and with their backs to the grimy brick would pout and abstain as if they their tea was in Richmond but’d lay with the first lad to tear down that drape-ry and spatter it with urine.

[Anonymous No.10369950]

>>10368883
>>10368888
>>10368891
>>10368896

Not bad.

[Anonymous No.10369975]

>>10360696
plz respond

[Anonymous No.10370067]

She stepped through the front door to his apartment and then took off one coat, leaving on the rest.
"Dining room's over there," he said.
They walked over together then he turned into the kitchen while she pulled out a chair for herself. Some kind of foreign music was playing. Japanese? Chinese?
"Who sings this song?" she asked, not wanting to ask the race.
"A computer," he said.
She thought about it for a moment then laughed, figuring he just meant it was playing on a stereo. He looked at her like she was retarded, then turned back to his steaming pot.
"What are you making?"
"Ramen."
Japanese!
"How can you tell when it's done?"
He pulled some of the noodles up with a fork. "When the noodles are straight enough."
He let the noodles flop back into the boiling pot, then tore open a packet of seasoning, dumped the contents in, and scrambled everything around with the fork, scratching the bottom. He lifted the pot off the red burner and carried it over to the two square bowls he'd prepared in advance, using the fork to pull noodles out of the pot and into the bowls before pouring soup overtop of them. He went back and turned the burner off afterward. The girl-slash-woman watched him bring the two hot bowls over to the four-chaired table and then sit down across from her. He twirled some ramen up with his fork and lifted it up to his mouth, and then he stopped and looked at her. She just sat there, smiling with Japanese music in the background.
"Oh, forgot to get you a fork."
He ran back to the kitchen and pulled a drawer out, rattling all the utensils around. He grabbed a fork and then walked over to an outlet, and then remembered that "girls don't think suicide's funny" and that he'd made two cups of hot cocoa in the microwave, to go with the ramen, so he opened the microwave up and grabbed the cups.
"I made hot coffee," he said from the kitchen, looking at her blow on her food.
She frowned at him. "Coffee?"
"I mean, chocolate," he said, walking over with the fork and hot coco. "Do you want me to change the music?"
"No," she said, accepting the chocolate and the fork.
Deep down the man-slash-boy wished she'd just said yes. Underneath the table he took his phone out—big, with a black case—and then set the next track to something else. She saw this and mistook it for texting, but she bit her tongue, distinctly remembering that her roommate Sarah called her an attention whore three days ago. They ate their noodles in silence for a moment. Eventually, Bob Dylan came on, doing that thing where he sings vowel sounds through the back of his teeth.

[Anonymous No.10370151]

I've been making a story in my head for the past 2 years, though I've been struggling tidying it up to make it a clear and competent plot.

I've been making it about a group of "Villians" who uses public fear to secretly improve the lives of common folk ala Robin Hood, with the "Heroes" using public adoration to further their influence and personal pride.

I've been brainstorming a scene where one of the Villians gets killed, but I'm trying to avoid making it sound cheesy and cliche, hope it's not too good awful.

The context is his dying words to the killer if it helps.

Death is not the end for me, for I know that there is peace on the other side. The virtues I established onto others, the lives we've nurtured, the people we loved, is evidence alone for my path into paradise. But I am not perfect, as the sins committed by my hands are enough to eternally damn my soul. Though I cannot say the same for you.

For I know, that wherever and whenever your life takes it's toll, you won't be joining me. As the darkest, deepest, most agonizing depths of hell will open to swallow you whole. And only then will you fully comprehend the meaning of Justice.

[fuck No.10370167]

>>10370067
She stepped through the front door to his apartment and then took off one of her coats, leaving on the rest of them.
"Dining room's over there," he said, pointing.
She waddled down behind him, then he turned into the kitchen while she pulled out one of the four chairs for herself. Some kind of foreign music was playing. Japanese? Chinese?
"Who sings this song?" she asked, not wanting to ask the race.
"A computer," he said.
She thought about it for a moment then laughed, figuring he just meant that it was playing on a stereo. He looked at her like she was retarded, then turned back to his steaming pot.
"What are you making?"
"Ramen."
Japanese!
"How can you tell when it's done?"
He pulled up some of the noodles with a fork. "When the noodles are straight enough."
He let the noodles flop back into the boiling pot, then tore open a packet of seasoning, dumped the contents in, then scrambled everything around with the fork, scratching the pot’s bottom. He lifted everything up off the red burner by the pot’s handle and then moved over to the two square bowls he'd prepared in advance, turning the pot sideways and using the fork to pull noodles out of it and into the bowls before pouring the soup on top, getting just the right amount in each dish. He went back and turned the burner off afterward. The girl-slash-woman watched him bring the two hot bowls over to the four-chaired table and then sit down across from her. He twirled some ramen up with his fork and lifted it towards his open mouth, then he stopped and looked at her. She just sat there, smiling with Japanese music in the background.
"Oh, forgot to get you a fork."
He ran back to the kitchen and pulled a drawer out, rattling all the utensils around. He grabbed a fork and then walked over to the outlet, and then remembered "girls don't think suicide's funny" and that he had two cups of hot cocoa in the microwave, to go with the ramen, so he walked over and opened it up and grabbed them both.
"I made hot coffee," he said from the kitchen, watching her blow on her food without a utensil to eat it with.
She frowned. "Coffee?"
"I mean, chocolate," he said, walking over with the fork and hot coco. "Do you want me to change the music?"
"No," she said.
He wished she'd just said yes. Underneath the table he took his phone out—big, with a black case—and then he set the next track to something else. She saw this and mistook it for texting, but she bit her tongue, distinctly remembering that her roommate Sarah called her an attention whore three days ago. They ate their noodles in silence for a moment. Eventually, Bob Dylan came on, doing that thing where he sings vowel sounds through the back of his teeth.
"You like jazz?" he said.

[Anonymous No.10370491]

I sat on the wooden step of the cabin surrounded by the smell of fish scales and firs. The whole of the cabin was constructed of that wood, bent out of shape and snored in the wind like an old man sleeps on public transport. Id been hold up here for the past two weeks. The clocks ticked in defiance, spiting my restlessness. It isn’t that I don’t love nature but there some things happenin outside of it I intended to be a part of. I got up and chopped some wood; lit a fire to fight away the night. The flame ate up the air, gettin hotter and brighter and smellin like it used to when I’d come out here before. The sound of birds carried by the wind was sporadically punctured by the fires pop of burnt up wood. The trees snored that contagious snore of the cabin, like a bacteria coughed up by the wind. And I couldn’t see too much. All I could do was sit and listen, while the fire kept the darkness but a few steps from me. That fire that couldn’t keep them images from being burnt into the back of my eyelids when I closed em. That fire that I could stare at deep, till the back of my eyes looked all white when shut - but those images always were there.

I took the drainin fish to a spitroast over that fire; walked over the creek to toss the bucket of guts. Not that there was tons of em, but enough to stink some’mh over here bigger than me. Some’mh that might be scared of the flame and my uprightness take to eatin me. The bears weren’t hardly what I was scared of, but it was something to consider hard enough to walk through them dark n shrubs to toss them guts. The sound of an engine, like a breath outta the woods’ lung, leaked from it. Maybe they were pickin me up at last. I lay into the chair and lit my pipe to complete the picture. A flame burned in my chest; in my eyes’ lids. My ears swallowed those motor sounds like a resuscitated swallows up air. There’s a fire inside of me that burns for this, that pushes back the long day’s night.

[Anonymous No.10371735]

>>10370151
be mindful of what you're trying to say in the context of everything else that's ever been written.
can you say something that's probably been said before in a way no one's ever heard it?
you need to bruteforce your imagination into creating unique figurative language, because half of what makes good writing appealing is the 'oh, *blushes*' moment after you read a funky similie.

[Anonymous No.10371992]

9 years. That is the time it took for my being to actualize itself. Under the most peculiar of circumstances. 9 Years of life in which, despite my claims, I didn't really know of a world outside myself and, by extension, without anything to define myself against, a world inside of me. Nothing more than a hazy dream not yet aware of the dreamer. As so often in these years I found myself alone in the garden of my parrental home when quiet, but nonetheless distressed, chirping caught my ear. Since early childhood I had felt a perhaps, for someone my age, unusual allure from the image of a scholar writing in his chambers with feather and inkwell. Upon inspection I found the source of the chirping to be a nest of small birds. Exceot these young ones hadnÄt yet taken flight and found themselveson the ground, beneath their parental home. Quickly my desire found itself able to be fullfilled. I took up a stick went toward one of the birds. I hit it over the head. The chirping stopped. In the very next moment, upon inspcetion of the now motionless body the feathers exposed themselves as nothing more than fine soft fuzz. The full futility of my action exploding inside of me, shocking my mind out of its premordial state and into concsiousness.

cont.

[Anonymous No.10371997]

>>10371992
The state of my newly formed self was one of pure contradiciton and chaos. Pain and sorrow filled me to an extent I had never felt before as I first realized the sheer wonder of life. This bird, this being, this living breathing thing, had ceased to exist, because of me. For no purpose at all. Even a death for the fullfillment of pure sadistic pleasure on my part would have held more meaning. Nothing was learned that could not be known before. If only I had taken the tiniest of moments to contemplate what was before me. And yet, it was dead. And it would never live again. I had taken a life which until this very point wasn't exactly any different to my own. It expressed itself as I did. Felt, as I did. Breathed, as I did. And it was completely unaware of its own existence, as I had been. Nothing up until that point had been an act of free will. Only the externalization of instinct. And as it ceased, I began. To this day I regard the death of that bird as the most senseless act I have undertaken in all of my life. Killed for no other reason than ability to do so and unawareness that anything could die. Since, before that point, life itself, even my own, was not something I knew of as anything but a word, never grasped in concept.