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 Morbo 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
Posts: 9754 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
If a chill, the kind that runs down your spine when the certainty of life or human trustworthiness falls out from under you, could be condensed into a liquid, it would settle on the dusty blue blades of sagebrush as the dew that settled sweetly on them now. If all the breathings of fickle promises to ever sigh from plump, smiling lips were congregated together on the sterile rock buttes above, they would build up enough momentum to teeter and then fall, howling, cartwheeling, and skipping across the vast bowl that was the Basin, blowing dry with a laugh and a lark all that dense chilly dew.
If the oaths we swore were written down somewhere by some monumental phantom hand, they were written in the cracks of this very earth, in a script so large you can only make out the letters from the ancient observatory above on the butte. Every patch of thirsty ground a dot on some cosmic i, bold little grasses now inhabit the punctuation of letters that haven't been read by anyone since the speakers of this tongue died away.
It is in an absolute vacuum of human observers that this meadow rises up to peer at the soft green dawn, but our voices and our bones and our stories provide the nitrogen with which it makes the energy to rise at all. It sees us before we round the bend, and titters with a slight anticipation, having felt the last pilgrim footfalls as anciently as it felt the last truly satisfying drops of a decent summer rain.
Posts: 9754 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Cool. I like the "stream of consciousness" aspect of the piece. It reads like poetry. I don't know if I would change anything. It's almost musical. In fact, I'd like to see it set to music.
I haven't read anything like this from those I've seen on the list above, so, I'll just guess Orange7Penguin, seeing as I do not know this person (bird?).
(edit to bold the penguin)
[ March 29, 2005, 06:29 PM: Message edited by: Erik Slaine ]
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Oooh, intriguing. I'd like to know what this piece is intended for (novel? story? stand-alone prose?) - it would be easier to figure out what the vague sort of voice is supposed to mean. If it's purposely poetic, it's working well, but if it's supposed to be narrative, I think it's a bit self-aware and... um... inflated.
The tone of the piece and the setting make me think it's someone from the west - and things like sagebrush and buttes and basins make me think it's someone from Utah. There's a lot of that Utah flavor where they assume that everyone else grew up in the desert too. I think my bet guess from that rationale would have to be Brinestone.
(edit: to boldly bold where no bold has bolded before )
It's got a science and christian feel, between the word choices of condensed and congregate. My second guess would be Elizabeth, but I'll begin with BannaOJ.
The problem is that a chill doesn't run down my spin. I get a pain in my gut or my heart, so it makes me wonder if that's just a cliche.
I'm not big into nature, but I imagine that this is written by someone who looks for answers in science. The prose is fine. It reminds me of the beginning of the Janet Fitch's White Oleander. That book sold a zillion copies and they made a movie out of it, but I got to page three and put it down, owing to all of the jibber-jabber about nature. Maybe everything was a symbol, but there is a sense in which I like a nice told story about people, no metaphors.
If the whole book was written like this, kind of side-ways, I may lose patience.
posted
I like very much the images and the metaphors but the sentences were so long that I had to reread several times to get everything straight. I would have a rough time reading a full story written in this style. The passage is quite poetic and I'll base my guess on that aspect although that doesn't seem to be helping me. Ummm....Belle?
Posts: 2022 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:it would settle on the dusty blue blades of sagebrush as the dew that settled sweetly on them now.
Is settled in the correct tense. Shouldn't it be "settles," because of the "now"? My ear isn't the best with respect to these issues, but I think that the second settled should be either in the present tense. I'd use a different word for the first settle, btw.
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
It's very lovely, but also a bit twee; it is, in a word, eccentric, which makes it both extremely enjoyable and, I suspect, difficult to sustain at length. It's a bit coy and self-aware, and I would like to see where the author is going with it before deciding whether the tone is appropriate. Use of the word "nitrogen" is jarring and yet perfectly in keeping with the style: poetic and technical, all at once.
Since AJ's already been guessed, I'm going to say Elizabeth.
"Oaths" is correct, and is pronounced in two ways that are very difficult to transliterate. But Irami is right: "settled" is incorrect, since the other two paragraphs are in present tense. Personally, I prefer past tense for this sort of thing, and would rather change them and keep "settled" than change "settled" and keep them.
posted
I really suck at this game, but it's fun. I liked this piece a lot. It's fairly polished, no teenager wrote this I would guess. And it's playful, in a weird way. Based on that, I'm guessing Papa Moose.
quote:It's very lovely, but also a bit twee; it is, in a word, eccentric, which makes it both extremely enjoyable and, I suspect, difficult to sustain at length.
I agree, I had the same thought: lovely but that it would be very hard to keep going indefinately. I wonder how you could segue to another style from this? I couldn't pull it off, I wish.
"letters that haven't been read by anyone since the speakers of this tongue died away." The ending to this paragraph is a little confusing--whose tounge? The English tounge of the author? We're still around. Ancient Indians?--but if it's Indians, why does the paragraph start "oaths we swore"??
quote: "Oaths" is correct, and is pronounced in two ways that are very difficult to transliterate.
1. Oaths, vowel rhymes with oaf, as in "look at that lazy oaf". 2. Oaths, vowel rhymes with loaves, as in bread.
This type of prose is among some of the most complicated I've read. If you're looking for a small but very admiring audience, this is the way to go . We had a book written like this in an English class and by the date we were supposed to discuss it, no one had read it but me. I loved it, and I really like this. However, I did have to read it out loud in order to get the length of the sentences. My advice would be, if you're going to write like this, throw in some shorter sentences to keep the author going and to keep the prose interesting. Or you risk daunting everyone who sets eyes on the page.
quote: so large you can only make out the letters from the ancient observatory above on the butte.
I'm pretty sure this "can" should be a "could". The whole thing, with the can replaced:
quote: If the oaths we swore were written down somewhere by some monumental phantom hand, they were written in the cracks of this very earth, in a script so large you could only make out the letters from the ancient observatory above on the butte.
I think that's how it should be.
I don't mind the "chill, the kind that runs down your spine when the certainty of life or human trustworthiness falls out from under you," bit. Because the whole thing was surreal and cosmic, being personal and real didn't matter to me. This is a collective chill of humanity/the "we" in this passage and the only way to describe it is with that collective cliche.
Yeah. Just watch you don't have too many long sentences with abstract metaphors together or you'll be sued for head explosions.
This could be male or female, but its certainly a wordy person. All the people I'd guess first have been guessed, so I'll guess Astaril, because I do no really know him or her.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:but our voices and our bones and our stories
I just love this little snippet - I said it out loud a few times and I just love the way it sounds.
This definitely has a poetic feel. I wish I knew what type of larger work it was part of - it's hard to critique it without knowing. If it's in a story, then it is very distracting, it definitely doesn't move the story along.
But it may be entirely appropriate depending on what type of piece it is.
quote:It is in an absolute vacuum of human observers that this meadow rises up to peer at the soft green dawn,
I'm not crazy about the choice of "vacuum" was a word here. When I hear vacuum I think space, and that is too stark of a contrast with the imagery of the meadow. It disrupts the flowy, dreamlike feel to that paragraph for me.
I have no clue who wrote this piece - but I'm very curious to learn more about what it's supposed to be.
I'm guessing Jenny Gardener because something about this reminds me of a story she told at the first Wenchcon - about being outside in her garden and the whole tings being dreamlike and magical.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
This is pretty cool. I like the difference between empty promises and real oaths. I like how the oaths are portrayed as ancient but still fertile. There's some good material getting built here.
I did have to reread this once because it's so dense. I don't know if I'd have the energy to read more than a few pages of this. But it's very well crafted and definitely a delight to the senses.
I'm going to guess Dante.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
I really like this piece. I've been reading these but not critiquing, because I'm terrible at critiquing anything. But I'll say what I like about it.
I like the sense I get that the place itself has an awareness or a consciousness of some kind. This allows an even better feeling of 'ancient' to come out of the descriptions of long-dead speakers of forgotten tongues and so forth. Also, I like how the third paragraph ties together this ancient, non-human place with human life. There's a great sense of intereconnectedness within the universe I get from it (I may be reading *way* too much into this), which gives me the feeling some of that interconnectedness is going to be explained or at the least examined later in the plot. As well, the prose itself is musical and original, and I like the word-choices.
I haven't got a clue who wrote it. Someone from the desert, but I can't keep track of who lives there... let's say, Annie. Because judging from the above post, she's obviously just anxious for her identity to be revealed so she can respond to all the critiques.
Posts: 624 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
URggh. I thought of Annie, but I didn't think she was tricksy enough to guess when her own excerpt came up. I guess she is. It's good writing, Annie. I was going to get your book The Lotus Eaters (is that the title?) before, now I really want to read it.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
I guess if she'll shamelessly plug her own book while pretending a stranger wrote it, she'll post on her own GtA thread. I'm not critical, I think it's funny. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
Annie when you said this passage was inflated was that just pretending to think that or did you actually think that?
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Well, I like it, but I know that my writing tends to be inflated in general.
What this piece is intended for is (as astaril figured out quite well) an introduction to a novel I'm doing that's all about place and how it defines us and how we define it. The novel is cyclical - going through several vastly separated time periods that are nonetheless parallel. It's about pilgrims and nomads - people who aren't defined by place - and places that define people. My working title is The Natives are Restless and is a lot about colonialism and current events in an indirect way.
It's intentionally poetic, but the story itself is more narrative, if abstract. It's intentionally eccentric, and the incongruous vocabulary is something I purposely try to achieve in my writing and my artwork - I think sticking science terms into a bit of flowery prose is roughly similar to sticking words and pop culture items into pretty landscapes in visual art.
I really appreciate the suggestion to intersperse the long sentences with shorter ones, and I'll make an effort to do that. One of my worst tendencies is to churn out long, convoluted sentences that make sense once you diagram them but don't make good casual reading. That streamlining will definitely help, even though the style is intentionally verbose.
Thanks for all the input! This was really fun, and I enjoyed being so tricksy. Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
T_Smith, I missed this the first time around. How do I submit something for consideration and how do I get my name on the possible authors list?
posted
Ah, so sorry. I posted how on the new thread, but just so you can see it here, you can send it to smokingman@gmail.com. I can still accept a submission, though I think this might have to be the last round before we go into another set.
Posts: 9754 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I think my bet guess from that rationale would have to be Brinestone.![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
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