Age of Aurora part 5

[LeoCrow]

Most of you probably won't remember, but years ago I posted parts from the first two stories from a series of a sci-fi comedy stories i am writing with a friend. We stopped writing for a while and tried to learn from the mistakes of the first stories. And I do believe we did.

This is the first part of the (incomplete at the time being) fifth story. This story is also intended to be a good jump on point for the rest of the stories.

[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]

[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Amsterdam… Used to be the most famous city of the Netherlands and one of the most beautiful in the world. Now it is every bit as beautiful; though, not a city any more. It was late in the 21st century that all prediction had it the dams protecting the city, its canals, buildings and inhabitants wouldn’t hold against the rising sea. The whole area around its historic centre was evacuated and the people relocated several kilometres inland, behind some relatively new, extra-high dikes. The evacuation of the metropolitan coastal areas of Noord and Zuid Holland was deemed the most prudent solution, as it was the least resources-consuming. Up on the top of the new dikes there’s a motorway and a wide promenade, most of the time crowded with tourists. These very pedestrians are privileged to behold a quite rare view of not-so-much tamed nature extending to the north-east. For the old ways to keep the water out didn’t fail, as the sea barely penetrated them. The Afsluitdijk gave in to the unpredictable North Sea, in several places, after a series of storms. Apart from making IJsselmeer Zuiderzee again, the environmental change and the precautions against loss of life created the Museum City of the Venice of the North and some thousand acres of almost-never-underwater valuable real estate. The estate was bought by the Senate in an attempt to provide funds for the modernization of the flood control network.

[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A magnificent palace, built in a style named faery, to match the surroundings, stands in front of the city centre, on a peninsula reclaimed from the Markermeer, a strong reminder that although the Dutch still have their own government in the Hague, the empire is there, looking down on them. The beautiful garden surrounding the palace is filled with tulips and spreads to the north as far as the eyes can see. Not even a path is visible, since all transport in or out of the palace is by small planes that land in a private airway within the estate.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A lonely tulip was enjoying the morning breeze, slowly looking up towards the life giving Sun god, when a large hoof landed over it. Did anyone think life’s fair? Even in a fair-y place such as this. A large hot blooded stallion was galloping proudly through the tulip field, paying no attention to the colourful flowers. Its thrilled rider was princess Inara, wife of Ardene, heir to the throne of the empire. Times like this allowed her to forget everything and feel truly free and, predictably, as these things go, happy.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]As soon as the palace was out of sight, they stopped and she walked the horse to a nearby tree to rest. She absorbed the landscape. Green fields with islets of colourful flowers as the eye could reach, spotted here and there with traditional water pumps, windmills, or not so traditional water pumps disguised as windmills. Soothing, the best cure after a charity world tour. She had almost fallen asleep when she realized that someone was standing menacingly in front of her. She opened her eyes to see Amelia, her sister-in-law, daughter of emperor Geron and sister or prince Ardene. [/FONT]
"What are you doing here?" Inara asked.
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The horse was minding its own business till then, but felt curious about who the girl was talking to. It approached with interest, and perhaps the idea of a sugar cube, which translates in horse-hope. But the sight of Amelia scared it! It started running away, as if something terrible was behind it. The two young women started running behind it instinctively, not really expecting to catch it. The stallion was approaching a steep cliff but it didn't really pay attention to where it was going. It kept looking back to them, when it suddenly realized that it didn't have any more ground under its feet. But it was too late.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]The girls got to the edge but all they saw was fire as the horse had just exploded! Stunned, the girls just looked at the fire, not knowing what to believe. A smell of roast meat was filling their nostrils. They remained silent for a while.[/FONT]
"Well, I guess somebody planted a bomb in him" said Princess Amelia several moments later. "Poor horse" she sighed.
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"Hey! I could have been on him when it happened!" Inara gasped towards Amelia, who didn't return the look.[/FONT]
"Yes, it's a good thing you survived, but can't you respect the fact that a good horse died?" Amelia said, full of spite. She didn't really care about the horse; she just wanted to tease her sister-in-law. And Inara knew that but she was too angry to think anything clever to say. After all, she couldn't even be sure that Amelia was innocent in this. Why was she there anyway?
"Are you alright?" a worried voice sounded behind them. The girls turned to see four security guards standing a few feet away from them.
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"We're fine" Amelia answered. "Somebody planted a bomb in the horse and it blew up" she said in a cold voice.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"Oh, my!" said the guard who spoke before with a shocked look. "Poor creature!" He examined the remains down below. “Barbequed” he sighed not without astonishment.[/FONT]
"I could have been riding him when it happened" Inara said angrily.
"That was probably their intention" he said, and Inara felt shocked by the realization that maybe someone was actually trying to kill her rather than the horse. Who would want to do something like that? Her eyes, as if they had a will of their own, suddenly turned to Amelia.
[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"Please," Amelia said dismissingly, after noticing the accusing stare, "I would have chosen a far more elegant method, like poison. Bombs are too impersonal for my tastes. I mean, any wacko that pays more attention to ideology and effect than wisdom can stuff their pet or brat with a load of weapons grade hydrogen and a detonator. Where’s the thrill in that? It involves no expansion of the understanding, it’s mere fanaticism".[/FONT]
"Are you saying I shouldn't be afraid of you?"
Amelia returned the look blankly. "No, I'm saying that I wasn't responsible for this" she said and turned her attention to the guards. "By the way, how did you get here so fast? We're miles away from the castle".
"We were on our way to you already because we were tasked with the delivery of an urgent personal message".
"Personal for whom? Me or her?" Amelia asked.
"Both of you actually" the guard answered.
"Then what are you waiting for? You said it's urgent!"
The four guards looked at each other meaningfully and suddenly put small gas masks (well hidden before then) on their faces. Before the two girls could react, the man who spoke with them threw a gas bomb between them. They were both unconscious by the time they hit the ground.

Please comment, critisize, advize over our writting style.
The first four stories can be found at Age of Aurora[/FONT][/FONT]

 

[J Riff]

Well, that's exactly where I was born, right in the flood zone, but all I remember is dykes n' windmills. And tulips and wooden shoes.
Exploding horses and palaces ? I'm moving back asap.

 

[LeoCrow]

It's set about three hundred years in the future. It's also a comedy (the exploding horse is a running gag in this story). Almost every story is set on a different country, and where the imperial family is concernet, a different palace. So what did u think?

 

[The Judge]

Hello there

I don't know what guidelines existed when you were posting before, but recently the stickies have been updated as to formatting requirements in critiques. You might like to have a look at them. One of the points mentioned is that people should ensure there's a line space between paragraphs so as to break the text up. If the paragraphs are all run together, like here, then we're faced with a wall of text which can be a little daunting to read. This may be one of the reasons that you have had a number of visitors coming to the thread but so far no critiques (I think J Riff will forgive me on that point).

I'm a nit-picky critiquer, so I concentrate on things like spelling and punctuation and word use. As to which you have a few problems. (NB It does occur to me that perhaps English isn't your first language, in which case mistakes are perhaps inevitable, but I thought it would still be of help if I pointed a few things out.)

Firstly, you are punctuating dialogue wrongly in places. I'm assuming this is because you don't know the rules rather than sloppy editing because the mistakes are so frequent. There is quite a bit on this in a sticky called The Toolbox at the top of Aspiring Writers, but basically in the sentence [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"We're fine" Amelia answered.[/FONT][/FONT] you need a comma after "fine" inside the quotation marks.

Other punctuation errors include misplaced commas and oddities eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Now it is every bit as beautiful; though, not a city any more.[/FONT][/FONT] the semi-colon should be a comma, and the comma you do have shouldn't be there. One way of checking punctuation use is to read the work out loud -- where you pause you need something. If the pause is a long one, you need a full stop (though I think you're on top of that one), running down through colon, semi-colon, all the way to comma for the shortest pause.

Your sentence structure is also odd in places, if not downright wrong eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Amsterdam… Used to be the most famous city of the Netherlands[/FONT][/FONT] I assume you're trying for a kind of sententious pause with the elipsis, which is fine if that is really what you want -- a kind of portentous voice-over from a hammy actor at the beginning of a travel documentary. But in that case, you can't have "Used" beginning the next sentence, it has to be "It used". Also eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]It was late in the 21st century that all prediction had it the dams protecting the city... wouldn’t hold against the rising sea.[/FONT][/FONT] -- this might just pass muster in dialogue since after re-reading once or twice the meaning is clear, but in narrative -- and at the beginning of the work, no less -- it reads very badly with the "all prediction had it"; better to make it "that it was universally predicted...".

On word-use, "airway" is a route a plane takes in the sky (or a part of the body); you mean "airstrip". You might be attempting a pun with "fair-y" (which, of course, bears no relation to a meaning of a place which is fair or just) but it doesn't work, to my mind, and you're better off without it. And a hoof lands "on" a flower, not "over" it. And even as a metaphor "absorbed" cannot be used for "landscape", only for the surrounding sensations (ie, one might absorb the silence, or the scent), though frankly I'd advise against it.

Once or twice I couldn't quite grasp what you were trying to say because things were written so oddly eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]"Hey! I could have been on him when it happened!" [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Inara gasped towards Amelia, who didn't return the look.[/FONT][/FONT] Is the "gasped" meant to be dialogue attribution, ie in place of "said"? If so, I'd suggest changing it, as it's difficult to gasp an entire sentence. ("Hey!" she gasped. would work, however.) But where does the "toward" come in? How does one "gasp toward" someone else? And what is the "look" which isn't returned?

There are some things which might be typos, but which also might be mistakes of understanding/English eg "resources-consuming" is an inelegant phrase, but if it must be used, it should be "resource", single. Similarly, [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]as far as the eyes can see[/FONT][/FONT] is cliche so I'd suggest is dropped, but if it has to be included, it is "eye", single. And something like "life giving" should be hypenated (ie "life-giving"); the same for "hot blooded".

And some things were definitely typos eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]colourful flowers as the eye could reach[/FONT][/FONT] -- "as far as" (though it's all but identical to the earlier locution, and is a cliche in itself, so I'd suggest dumping it) and [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif] sister or prince Ardene[/FONT][/FONT] "of" (but since we can all grasp the concept of sister-in-law, and you've already told us Ardene is the heir to the Imperial throne, I don't think you need to tell us this and the fact she's the Emperor's daughter) NB It's Princess Inara, and Prince Ardene -- capitals for their rank.

On bigger issues, you swap from present tense to past tense eg [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]These very pedestrians are privileged[/FONT][/FONT] (present); [FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]A large hot blooded stallion was galloping proudly[/FONT][/FONT] (past). I can see that you might want to imply that the watching pedestrians and the castle etc are still there in the present day when the tale is being told, but the story of the princess happened in the past, but the swap between the two is handled in a very ungainly way.

For my own taste, I'm not keen on whimsy, so I'm afraid the story did nothing for me as a whole. The going into the tulip's POV irritated me, as did the direct address to the reader ([FONT=Times New Roman, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Did anyone think life’s fair?)[/FONT][/FONT] and the later lengthy excursion into the horse's POV was even worse. I appreciate this kind of thing might appeal to others, though. But even in a world like this, you need to be internally consistent -- even if the sea didn't inundate the land, how on earth can there be cliffs near Amsterdam off which exploding horses can fall? And how did Amelia get there without a horse of her own?

It is no doubt a by-product of the whimsy, but the characters to me aren't fully fleshed human beings, they read more like cartoons, and I found the info-dumping about who they are and what they think intrusive. Overall, I can't pretend that the piece interests me enough to want to read further, but it's not a type of story, or written in a style, which attracts me, so others may well feel differently.

In any event, good luck with it.

 

[J Riff]

Yes, chip away at the sentence structure and it will get better.


Amsterdam used to be the most famous city of the Netherlands, and one of the most beautiful in the world. Today, it is every bit as beautiful, though not a city any more. It was predicted late in the 21st century that the dams protecting the city, and its canals, and buildings, wouldn’t hold against the rising sea. The entire area around it's historic centre was evacuated, and the people were relocated several kilometres inland, behind some relatively new, extra-high dikes.
(The evacuation of the metropolitan coastal areas of Noord and Zuid Holland was deemed the most prudent solution, as it was the least resources-consuming.???)
Up on the top of the new dikes there’s a motorway and a wide promenade, most of the time crowded with tourists. These very pedestrians are privileged to behold a quite rare view of untamed nature extending to the north-east.

 

[Precise Calibre]

I can see where you want to go with this, but like other people said, it needs to be polished quite a bit for it to achieve the impact I think you're looking for.

I went into it with a mindset akin to reading anything by Terry Pratchett, and while I see the outline of the mood you were seeking, the errors in the structure itself drew away from the atmosphere and humor. Follow the guidance given by our other members and I'm sure you'll get it where you want to!

 

[dgimp]

Hi everyone, and thanks for the remarks. Special thanks to J Riff whose country we almost flooded (yes, this is A.B. LeoCrow's collaborator in this literary adventure. I have posted something I've written some time ago to see how the emperor (not Geron but Αρδεναίος, Ardenaeus = Ardene) is like in this universe, please see the next post (I think), the six sages. Every comment on it is most welcome. Now Judge thank you for your time commenting on this. There are a number of issues I wish to address. First of all the bigger issue of the tenses: you see from the savant narrator's point of view tourists are still enjoyning the promenade while the explosive horse event happened once (obviously) and in his past, so that he knows about it. As far as the commas after the quotations are concerned I can remember a number of authors that don't use them. Most notably Agatha Christie. I'm not sure whether I've seen it in a US or 'international' (=US) edition, however. You're right that there are a number of editing oddities, as the semicolon after through you describe up there, but please be tactful. Trying to write an interesting scenario doesn't necessarily mean that one is disposed to do the editing themselves. After all these things happen. Next point, you're of course right about such things as gasping an entire proposition, but... (please correct me if I'm wrong) you seem to ask for goddamn photographic realism. After all, fiction is about the possible, not the actual. To the point again. Yeah, gasped is intended as a substitute to said, as far as I undersatnd it (after all Leo wrote it) but exactly because a whole sentence cannot be gasped it must necessarily mean that she gasped at the beginning of uttering. Am I wrong? To your defense, you are not obliged to imagine everything we try to describe, but still... it's kind of pedantic. If the "gasped" participle does not directly apply to everything that is written, then something additional is implied. Another point, I do not want to comment on the flower and equus POV, as you yourself say, other people might like it. I personally find them funny. Now [moving on] to a remark I think most important. Concerning the ranks of prince & princess. The imperial family is not the UK royal family (by the way the royal family still reigns on the UK, while it is part of a global, all-encompassing imperium). They resemble more the Byzantine or earlier Roman imperial courts, i.e. they are globalized. There is no official protocol for addressing them. You can call them "hey, dude!" (if you're on good terms with them), mister, senor, kyrie, monsieur, sir, sire, your excellency, your highness, your majesty, your eminence (even your holiness if you come from a background that is prone to conflate them with patriarchs or popes) and they won't raise an eyebrow. They do not mind etiquette, what they care about is their material status and real power (i.e. the ability to influence the will of others). However, they are proponents of a constitutional democracy. By the way, the empire being installed around 2200, they have never claimed they are emperors dei gratia, by the grace of God. They rather would support that it is through their "presiding over a human parliament (yes, everything not capital) via the counsel of the senate the grace of God can reach its full potential over our peoples (not subjects or realms)". Notice that if analyzed, this effectively means that maintaing the rule of law God is more or less obliged to offer His (here capital letter) grace over the said peoples whatever they might do, so long as they admit that they are only humans and errare humanum est. Now you see how you can use small letters and simultaneously effectively claim that you're God's favourite guy. Enough with politics and their weird implications. COncerning the hyphenation I really see no need to hyphenate metaphors. If people cannot discern they're metaphors, then so be it. Thank you again for your comments, and I apologize if I sound a bit aggressive. (a personal experience here: at some points so did you). Thanks again, honestly.

 

[The Judge]

Er... well... I'm not sure quite what the point of most of that was, dgimp, but obviously it's up to you and LeoCrow as to whether you wish to take cognisance of anything that's put forward in a critique.

As far as questions of correct punctuation and the correct use of English are concerned, you can of course ignore these as much as you (both) want. I think, though, that it is best to understand the rules and the reasoning behind the rules before rejecting them out of hand. For instance:

COncerning the hyphenation I really see no need to hyphenate metaphors. If people cannot discern they're metaphors, then so be it.

The hyphenation of hot-blooded and life-giving is not because they may or may not be metaphors, but because forming a compound word in this way helps to make the sense of it clear.

In any event, for anyone less than a literary genius I would suggest it is foolhardy in the extreme to ignore conventions of this kind. Not only will it alienate readers if mistakes are made, but any chance of having the work taken up by an agent or publisher is drastically reduced. Of course, if the two of you have no intention of publishing the work, then it matters not if infelicities of style and technique create a barrier to the reader's enjoyment.

I'm sorry if my first post appeared in any way, shape or form to be aggressive; such was certainly not my intent. Bluntness is an unfortunate corollary of trying to say a great deal in a fairly short space. Be assured, I reserve my aggression for those who genuinely annoy me.

 

[J Riff]

MMMMM....... Commas and punctuation are as, if not more important than the words. A comma equals two or three words( pause here)
If you follow all the rules, the writing becomes invisible, and the meaning is clear, to anyone. A good writer can use a raft of uncommon words and not lose any readers, who can tell or guess or look up what they need to.
Dialogue - said is invisible, use it every single time, a hundred times in a row, unless gasped or whooped is truly neccessary.
Remember, the reader is under no obligation whatsoever to know anything at all. Jargon is an affliction of educated people, but it still makes for lousy reading. )

 

[thwilli]

In some stories, large chunks of information are unavoidable, but it general I think it would be better to break up the info so that it is easier for the reader to assimilate. Also it helps to leave some of the detail to the readers imagination. Aside form that I think that it is a great medium to work with. I think that as global warming becomes a more serious issue, stories that show the effects of global warming and other natural disasters will become more popular.

 

[JCAllan]

Hi LeoCrow.

I thought this was a very interesting concept with a lot of potential for further development.

I think that your dialogue needs a bit of work to make it flow more naturally. Perhaps you could read it aloud to yourself and see where what your characters say differs from the way you would say it?

Anyway, I eagerly await updates.

 

[Peter Graham]

Now Judge thank you for your time commenting on this. There are a number of issues I wish to address. First of all the bigger issue of the tenses: you see from the savant narrator's point of view tourists are still enjoyning the promenade while the explosive horse event happened once (obviously) and in his past, so that he knows about it. As far as the commas after the quotations are concerned I can remember a number of authors that don't use them. Most notably Agatha Christie. I'm not sure whether I've seen it in a US or 'international' (=US) edition, however. You're right that there are a number of editing oddities, as the semicolon after through you describe up there, but please be tactful. Trying to write an interesting scenario doesn't necessarily mean that one is disposed to do the editing themselves. After all these things happen. Next point, you're of course right about such things as gasping an entire proposition, but... (please correct me if I'm wrong) you seem to ask for goddamn photographic realism. After all, fiction is about the possible, not the actual. To the point again. Yeah, gasped is intended as a substitute to said, as far as I undersatnd it (after all Leo wrote it) but exactly because a whole sentence cannot be gasped it must necessarily mean that she gasped at the beginning of uttering. Am I wrong? To your defense, you are not obliged to imagine everything we try to describe, but still... it's kind of pedantic. If the "gasped" participle does not directly apply to everything that is written, then something additional is implied. Another point, I do not want to comment on the flower and equus POV, as you yourself say, other people might like it. I personally find them funny. Now [moving on] to a remark I think most important. Concerning the ranks of prince & princess. The imperial family is not the UK royal family (by the way the royal family still reigns on the UK, while it is part of a global, all-encompassing imperium). They resemble more the Byzantine or earlier Roman imperial courts, i.e. they are globalized. There is no official protocol for addressing them. You can call them "hey, dude!" (if you're on good terms with them), mister, senor, kyrie, monsieur, sir, sire, your excellency, your highness, your majesty, your eminence (even your holiness if you come from a background that is prone to conflate them with patriarchs or popes) and they won't raise an eyebrow. They do not mind etiquette, what they care about is their material status and real power (i.e. the ability to influence the will of others). However, they are proponents of a constitutional democracy. By the way, the empire being installed around 2200, they have never claimed they are emperors dei gratia, by the grace of God. They rather would support that it is through their "presiding over a human parliament (yes, everything not capital) via the counsel of the senate the grace of God can reach its full potential over our peoples (not subjects or realms)". Notice that if analyzed, this effectively means that maintaing the rule of law God is more or less obliged to offer His (here capital letter) grace over the said peoples whatever they might do, so long as they admit that they are only humans and errare humanum est. Now you see how you can use small letters and simultaneously effectively claim that you're God's favourite guy. Enough with politics and their weird implications. COncerning the hyphenation I really see no need to hyphenate metaphors. If people cannot discern they're metaphors, then so be it. Thank you again for your comments, and I apologize if I sound a bit aggressive. (a personal experience here: at some points so did you). Thanks again, honestly

Will you be making all of these points in a prologue or an introduction to the work? Because whilst they may be obvious to the two of you, they most certainly aren't obvious to the average reader.

As well as agreeing with pretty much everything that Her Honour says, I saw a lot of tense-jumping, some odd word usage and a lot of info dumping. I won't go into detail now because it'll take time and I don't want to invest that time only to get a response like the one you gave to the Judge. But I will if you feel it would help, as there is clearly some good stuff under the surface.

Now, all of these issues which Judge and I have raised can be individually explained or justified (although ultimately it's your work and you don't need to justify anything to anyone if you choose not to). But taken together, I'm afraid that the overriding impression is one of a piece which needs a lot of tightening up and polishing on the technical front. That might well be the wrong impression, but it's certainly how it looks.

Regards,

Peter

 

[LeoCrow]

Thank you all for your comments. Peter Graham, the reason why i was disheartened and Antonis was upset and defensive on my part was that the Judge was too judgemental. He focused on the spelling and grammar, which were things that would have been corrected in the final version. I wrote this part and my main goal was to get the sceleton of the story and then we could work on it.

He failed to realise that we weren't native english speakers and that the story is meant to be a comedy as well as sci fi. It's not meant to be a masterpiece. His posts sounded like he was telling us to do everyone a favour and leave the writing to professionals. But noone is born professional, we are still learning. I didn't ask for praise in a forum called critiques but i didn't expect to be treated as someone completelly useless. It was the digital equivalent of taking my work and shredding it to pieces.

Anyway, I do welcome constructive criticism. Rest assured that the grammar and other mistakes will be dealt with in the final version.

The infodump is a valid concern of yours. In the first stories we were told by some people that we had too many characters and some people had trouble remembering who is who between the stories. That wasn't helped by the fact that we don't have too much time for writing what with my work and Antonis's studies for his doctorate degree. However, I seem to have overdone it in this story. It just has two main characters so I will have to minimize the infodump to it's bare minimum, thank you all for pointing that out.

As to the dialogues, can someone please point out some of the parts that don't work? I consider the dialogues in this story to be very important so thet have to be as good as possible. Thank you JCAllan for your suggestion to read it out loud, I will do it but since I'm not a native english speaker, I could miss some things.

thwilli you hit the nail on the hand with your post. Yes, the stories are set in a world very different that our current world, with many geological disasters and after several natural and political changes. The background of the stories will be somewhat dark and depressing, that's why it's wraped in a comedy shelling.

Again, thank you all for your comments and i eagerly expect any criticism that can help me get better at what I do

 

[HareBrain]

Again, thank you all for your comments and i eagerly expect any criticism that can help me get better at what I do

This rather contradicts what you said before. You want criticism that helps you get better at writing in English, but not criticism that helps you understand English tense usage and punctuation?

If you genuinely weren't interested in getting advice about grammar, punctuation etc, then perhaps you should have said so, so The Judge could have saved herself the time. But having read all the posts in this thread more closely, I can't see anything in her response that was "judgemental". It's up to you, if you really do have some magical process to correct the technical elements without working on them yourselves, to ignore advice like that, but nowhere in her post could I spot any hint that you should give up and leave it to professionals. She pointed out that she's a nit-picky critiquer, whereupon she identified a load of mistakes in areas you yourself admit weren't corrected, and she said that your whimsical style of story didn't appeal to her personally. That's hardly a basis on which to get defensive or disheartened.

For myself, I quite enjoyed the surreal nature of it, though I'm not sure how much longer it could go on for in this style ("does anyone think life's fair" etc) without something of more substance coming in. The relationship between Amelia and Inara, though painted in broad strokes, has potential for the comedy to develop into something deeper. I agree about the infodump.

I think, in this style, the stories could work as a series of short, whimsical comedies, but the background information makes it seem that you want the world and its invented history to be taken seriously. It seems to me that this combination would be quite a hard act to pull off. Interesting, though.

 

[chrispenycate]

I didn't critique this when it first came out because it didn't conform to the formatting guidelines (at least it doesn't on my computer) and I was expecting it to be closed. But I would have been every bit as tough on the grammar and punctuation as the judge.

I feel that corrections to tense or punctuation change the flow of a piece, and as far as possible the author should be in control of them. When it is a scientific document being cleared up, perhaps the information transmitted is the only important factor, but when there is artistry involved… otherwise, the 'translator' of the document becomes as important in the final form as the 'creator'.

And I do feel that replies to the critiques should respect the formatting standards, too; the block of text from dgimp is just about unintelligible.