posted
4 points for a critique and a guess 2 points for a guess and a rationale 2 more points if your guess with a critique/rational is correct 1 point for critiquing yourself -10 points for a guess without rationale or critique
Once you have a critique down, you get points for it. If you make a rational guess, but are incorrect you have to do a rational again, or at least say "for same reasons I stated before". You do not get points for a critique or rational for saying "what he said". You have to at least say what that person said in your own words for credit.
You can critique your own work for one point, but you can not give away you are the author. If you want, you can try to be sneaky and guess other people, with a rational, but you won't get points for it.
Heres the Guess list (not all names are entries):
Astaril Advice For Robots Annie BannaOJ Beatnix Belle Bob_Scopatz Brinestone Celia Chris Bridges Da_Goat Dan_Raven Dante dkw Dragon eslaine Eaquea Legit Elizabeth Icarus imogen Irami JamGodJeff JaneX jeniwren Jenny Gardener Jon Boy Kat Kwea LadyDay LadyDove Leonide Little_Doctor Ludosti Mackillian Noemon Nick Orange7Penguin Papa Moose Pooka/Trisha quidscribis Raia Rivka Ryuko Sarahdipity SarcasticMuppet Saxon75 ScottR sndrake Strider T_Smith Teshi The Pixiest Troubadour TomDavidson Twinky
The story will be in the next post.
Posts: 9754 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
He returned a moment later with a hammer. “Hold it on the ground,” he said.
“What for?”
“I want to see its brains.”
I wondered, Was he serious? With Jason, it wasn’t always easy to tell. Everything was fodder for a joke, and even I was not immune. As I got down to my knees, I wondered what the right response would be. If I refused, he would probably laugh at me for having taken him seriously. If I didn’t, he would probably still laugh at me. I guess I did what he said out of inertia more than anything else.
He got down on the concrete beside me and held the hammer unsteadily over the lizard’s head. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous himself or trying to position the hammer just right. I wondered dimly if he would really kill the lizard. It didn’t occur to me that I could act to affect the moment, that I could let go of the lizard or tell Jason to stop. I had become a spectator, frozen in place by the power of Jason’s personality or by the sheer perversity of what Jason seemed poised to do. Surely he wouldn’t?
I remembered uncomfortably how he had grabbed a stray cat by the front paws and tossed it end over end when I had told him how they always land on their feet, in order to verify it. The cat landed on its feet to Jason’s giggled delight and my stunned discomfort, and shot off around the corner of the building. But he was younger then, and this was different: he hadn’t killed the cat.
The hammer came down with a splat, and I looked down to find I was still holding what was left of the lizard, its fleet splayed out and its torso ending in a creamy red mash. I swallowed as the bile rose in my throat and quickly threw the accusing carcass away into a decorative planter. I looked up at Jason and our eyes met. For a moment he looked as shocked as I felt, and it occurred to me that perhaps he had been waiting for me to stop him, as the good cop to his bad, as the superego to his id, and that when I did not, he felt forced to go on with the act, rather than back down in front of me. It was a revelation to my young mind that the leader of all of my childhood adventures might not see himself as free, might feel pulled along by a convoluted code of roles and hierarchies.
Then he chortled and said, “Did you see that? Whoa!”
I awoke in the middle of that night to find I’d pissed my sheets for the first time in more than five years. I threw the evidence of my shame in the washer, put new sheets on the bed, put on clean underwear, and got back into bed, but now I could not fall back to sleep. Over and over I replayed the scene in my mind, imagining how it would have gone if I had acted differently, arguing with myself over my role in the slaughter. I knew that it was my own thoughts that were keeping me awake, but despite how I tried to just think of nothing, the arguments and counterpoints kept creeping back into my mind, until gray light seeped in through the window.
posted
I need something more than killing lizards and thrown cats to be a sign of a boy's deficency. If this is setting the stage for the boy to do something mean to people, then that's fine.
An angle that you could take, and one I would be interested in, is one where the narrator realizes that he doesn't have the constitution to live in a world of Jasons. If the narrator is freaking out over this, high school is going to drive him crazy, literally. If you shift the focus from how evil Jason is to the narrator not being able to cope with anyone's evil, I think you'll have a story. Though as I'm writing this, it's sounding eerily like the Bell Jar. Then again, there is only one Bell Jar for every five books about a mean older brother.
It's a little wordy for me. That's me, I don't need everything shown, and I knew that Jason was going to kill the Lizard. I'd cut right to the morally interesting part.
"I dreamt that Jason committed murder, then peed my pants. I was an accomplice, pinning the victim down as Jason bashed her head in with a hammer."
I don't think that this is over stating the point. To the narrator. It was murder. ANd that's what you are trying to capture, right? The narrator's lived experience. The prose is fine, a little wordy to my ear, but fine. I can't see anyone under 20 using the word chortle: Jon Boy
posted
Wow. This passage did its job - I really felt uncomfortable.
I like this a lot:
quote:It didn’t occur to me that I could act to affect the moment, that I could let go of the lizard or tell Jason to stop. I had become a spectator, frozen in place by the power of Jason’s personality or by the sheer perversity of what Jason seemed poised to do. Surely he wouldn’t?
It forestalls the reader's question "Why didn't he just let the lizard go?" And it's plausible.
I really loved the contrast over what he did with the cat. It was a neat little flashback that was so well done there didn't feel like a gap in the action. It also helps highlight the hesitancy of the narrtor - he didn't kill the cat, so maybe he won't really kill the lizard.
In short, I'm not finding a whole lot to critique - I think it's well written scene. I disagree with Irami - I think there are enough hints to prevent a foregone conclusion - that maybe he won't really kill the lizard.
I am going to guess IcarusPosts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
A child doesn't use words like id, ego, and super-ego-- I'll second Irami's critiscism of the language, but from the point of view that it doesn't match the narrator. Of course, your narrator could be remembering all of this, twenty years after the fact. . . if that's the case, you need to make the scene shorter. Cut out some of the description (Jason lowering himself unsteadily, for example).
If you're going to have the narrator wet himself, you've got to make the lizard's death and the revelations that come with it more potent. Right now, the emotion of the story is hidden behind psycho-jargon.
I'm guessing that the writer on this is pooka/Trisha.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I noticed the language, but I automatically assumed that it was reflective thing - the author looking back. Mainly because of the passage I quoted - if it was in the moment, it would be kind of strange for the narrator to be reflecting on why he didn't let the lizard go.
I took the whole passage as that of an adult looking back on a traumatic experience in childhood. Seeing it that way - it totally worked for me.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Guess this is what happens when you don't have a clue what this is all about. Found this site open on the library computer today and started reading. So, I signed up since I don't have anyone to talk to anymore.
Anyway, I smashed a lizard once not to long ago. Had to. He was in my sleeping bag and I don't share. Didn't pee my underwear and that's good cause I only have the one.
posted
I disagree with Irami wholeheartedly; the killing of the lizard is a big deal, and glossing over it in exposition is a clumsy author mistake made by people who don't care about character.
That said, neither is it a "slaughter;" unless the kid is overly sensitive, he wouldn't be using that terminology.
I think it's generally well-written, but might be a little high-minded for a child's voice -- which is okay if the kid is bookish or speaking from a point in the future. Use of the word "pissed" suggests a male author.
My guess is that it's someone who's a parent himself, but has never killed any lizards. Given the tropical setting -- where largish lizards actually live out in the open to be smooshed by children -- I'm going to guess Icarus.
This was not autobiographical. It is part of a 10,000-word story I've been shopping around for some time now, on and off. It's actually science fiction, though you wouldn't know it from this piece. This scene is part of a flashback, from about fifteen years in the narrator's future. Jason is not central to this story; in fact, we never see him again. This flashback illustrates the moral cowardice of the narrator, and his tendency to overintellectualize and rationalize himself into paralysis, which sheds light on his actions, or inactions, in the rest of the story, and the toll his failures take on him.
Though it is not autobiographical, everything I write incorporates things I have witnessed or lived through as details.
I chose this piece because I thought it would be hard to guess, because I thought it would be substantially darker than what you were used to seeing from me. Goes to show how much I know.
posted
I suspected that. It was very unlike you, at least as far as I know. Apparently others know your writing much better than I.
I would try to critique it for points, but I don't think I'd have much to contribute. It seemed well executed to me.
Posts: 2506 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Well, sheesh, Icky. You used lizards. In what kind of god-forsaken place do children mistreat lizards instead of Nature's intended subject, the ground squirrel?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Wow - that was quick. I really liked the piece though it really freaked me out and was going to use that gut reaction to guess a mature male author.
The prose flows very well for me; I don't mind the stalling of time as we wait for the hammer to fall - that's just the kind of thing you would expect a flashback to contain, whether it be the bedwetting flashback of that same night or the 20-years-ago flashback that I sensed right away from the mature tone of a juvenlie story.
Very nice bit of writing.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
In general I thought that it was very well done. I do question, though, the description of the crushed lizard head as "creamy red mash". What with the skin, crushed bone, and such, I can't imagine that it would be creamy. Clotted, maybe, or maybe "red smear"?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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My only critique is that the paragraphs could be shorter. And the flashback to the cat needs to be a little more subtle. Otherwise, it's too obviously a cliffhanger.
I did like how the hammer was up over the lizard's head while you went through all that background stuff. That made it really easy to return to the present just when the hammer came down.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
I know this was already guessed, but here's my critique:
Overall, I think this is very good. It's grippingly grostesque. When I was a bit younger I saw a boy stamping on frogs. He was a lot bigger than me, or I would have gone and thumped him. The horror I remember from seeing that, even as silent witness, was described here!
However, I have a few quibbles with it.
Because it's actually a memory, but we don't know it, its structure is a bit odd.
quote: It didn’t occur to me that I could act to affect the moment, that I could let go of the lizard or tell Jason to stop. I had become a spectator , frozen in place by the power of Jason’s personality or by the sheer perversity of what Jason seemed poised to do. Surely he wouldn’t?
This kind of works, but all of a sudden the "had" comes at you unexpectedly. Perhaps "I became a spectator..."? However not a major issue.
quote: I remembered uncomfortably how he had grabbed a stray cat by the front paws and tossed it end over end when I had told him how they always land on their feet, in order to verify it
Again not a major issue, but this sentence is a bit choppy- the last bit is tagged on; it sounds like he's verifying the cat. In fact, you don't need that last bit. Without "in order to verify it" we still know what the sentence means and what Jason has done.
However, this causes trouble all down the paragraph as the next sentence repeats the "land on their feet. Either way, with or without the "verify" phrase, the repeated "land/ed on their/its feet" isn't very smooth.
quote: he felt forced to go on with the act, rather than back down...pulled along by a convoluted code of roles and hierarchies.
All of a sudden, your sentences are longer, more complicated, less straight forward, less vivid, more flowing. This could be intentional- but just letting you know what happens in this paragraph.
This flow is then broken suddenly by the:
quote: Then he chortled and said, “Did you see that? Whoa!”
as you now doubt intended. However, nowhere in the passage is this same lyrical highly literate writing repeated. The next paragraph uses words like "pissed" and "over and over" which are more simplistic words. The result is that all of a sudden the reader isn't sure what has happened to the familiar, down-to-earth everyday narrator of a the rest of the paragraph!
posted
btw, that was not the whole scene, but rather the piece that I culled out for this activity, which might be why it was less than obvious that this was a flashback. Here is the intro to the scene [and, incidentally, the relevance to this experience with a lizard, besides the insight into the narrator's character, is that there is an alien race that is colloquially referred to as lizards, and the narrator has just, in the narrative, killed one]:
quote: When I was nine years old, I saw a real lizard die. This was back on Earth, after the Expansion, but before the outbreak of hostilities with the Grint. Like me, humanity was young then, and full of optimistic hope. Or perhaps I am simply projecting. Now, clearly, we are neither. What interesting times these have been.
I was living in the old project apartment I shared with my mother, and my best friend was Jason. We had absolutely nothing at all in common, except that we lived on the same floor and were about the same age. This, of course, was enough. All the old people in the building hated that we were friends; Jason was a known troublemaker, and a bad influence, and I was such a nice boy. Of course, when grownups think you are a nice boy, all it means is that you’re timid.
On any other day, we might have played one-on-one football in the scrubby little vacant lot by our building, or climbed trees in the park nearby. Maybe we would have played stellar patrol in the halls of the building, pretending we were agents on some orbiting space station. Any of these diversions would have been wrong for one reason or another; whatever we wanted to do was always against the rules. Sometimes I wondered if witnessing the impotent rage of the predominantly elderly residents of our state-subsidized complex was half of the fun. I think for Jason it was; I just did whatever Jason did. Although he was not significantly older than I was, Jason was like a god. He was a born leader, with everyone younger than twenty eagerly in tow. On this particular day, he had caught a lizard. “Look, Jorge,” said Jason, allowing the lizard to bite his finger and hang by his teeth. I was stunned.
“You want to try?” I shook my head as he offered his captive to me.
“It doesn’t hurt! Really!” How could it not hurt if the lizard was biting hard enough to hold itself up?
“Fine, then. Just hold it.” Jason held the lizard out to me and I grabbed it.
“Not by the tail, you scrote!” Too late, Jason warned me as I watched the lizard fall to the ground, with its tail still in my hand. When I remember it, the tail is twitching, but I’m not sure if it really happened that way, or if it’s just my imagination making it so.
“God damn!” said Jason as he dove after the fleeing lizard, just managing to cup his hands around it on the concrete floor.
“It’s still alive?” I asked incredulously. I noticed dimly that I was still holding the limp tail.
“Yeah. They don’t need their tails. They pull right off and it doesn’t even hurt them.” The lizard was still alive. I could plainly see that. Still, I doubted Jason’s statement that losing its tail hadn’t hurt it.
“Here,” he said, “you hold it. Hold it right here and don’t let go.” Jason put the lizard’s torso between my thumb and index finger and disappeared into his apartment. His parents weren’t home; they didn’t get summer vacation from their jobs the way we did from school, and there wasn’t summer camp for kids from our side of town. My mother was home. She hadn’t worked since she got cancer and went on the dole, but she slept most of the time. I was as free as Jason was.
He returned a moment later with a hammer. “Hold it on the ground,” he said. . . .
posted
You have a nice easy style. I think we are both given to use commas too often, but I don't think punctuation demon is inexorable, just fickle our my fingers. I like the piece better in context. Well done.
posted
Okay, I read the extended edition of the passage, and I really like it (although if I read this, I would immediately think of the slang "Buggers"- I don't know if that makes a difference to you or not!)
I like the name Jorge . I think it's perfect for what I've seen of the character, too.
However, my comment about the paragraph that suddenly launches into more 'academic' language still stands- all of a sudden, your casual flow changes. I realise this is getting ridiculously picky.
Other very picky problems: (If you think I'm being way too picky- I don't want you to think I think your writings no good, although the opinion of someone as young as me shouldn't really bother you, your writing is excellent- just tell me! This goes for everyone.)
When Jason goes into his parents apartement, we get a description of Jason's life, and through it Jorge's (clever, by the way, to explain Jorge's childhood through Jason ). However, although Jorge is left holding the lizard, there is nothing to say if this task was difficult, how the lizard felt under his hand, if the lizard wriggled while Jason was gone. Only a sentence here would add how alive the lizard felt (in contrast to his death), and also keep track of Jorge's actions while he's thinking. I don't get an image there of this important* moment in the scene.
*Important because Jorge is giving us information as well as projecting how apprehensive he is about what Jason is about to do- it's the only time in the scene when Jason's prescence and actions are not dominating. Also, since he's just killed one of the alien lizards, this echo, and this pause during the echo, gives you a chance to reiterate feelings about both incidents.
quote: My mother was home.
Perhaps "My own mother was home."
Or, you can rearrange the last passage so it is less "information giving".
The original:
quote: My mother was home. She hadn’t worked since she got cancer and went on the dole, but she slept most of the time. I was as free as Jason was.
The re-arranged:
quote: I was as free as Jason, but for different reasons. My mother hadn’t worked since she got cancer and went on the dole, but she slept most of the time.
I dunno. Your call. I just think the flow is better.
Anyway. End pickyness here.
Edit: I got rid of the second 'was' which in your casual style, is uneccessary.
It is a pretty interesting piece, one I could have written, except the "good cop:bad cop, superego:id" is out of place for the voice, which would otherwise seem to be a 10 year old child, either a boy or a Tom boy.
It's unfortunate that the paragraph breaks couldn't be corrected, but I'm just glad for the game to be going on.
So who does it be?
I'll guess Mack.
Edit: D'oh! It's especially embarassing that so many people guessed it, apparently independently. Well, I guess we can never say Tom and Belle don't agree on anything.
I'm not a slacker. Ok, so I am. I'll count up the points from the last 2 rounds Monday (going out of town tomorrow).
Posts: 9754 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
And here I thought he was waiting for more people to post critiques/observations of my piece.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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