posted
I've had this critted and processed most of the crits best I could and now I'm mainly looking for typos, nitpicky spelling, grammatical, punctuation errors. Of comma slices there are plenty.
Genre: SF Word Count: 7000 -------------------------------------------- In Jake Farmer's mind, Mr. Dumpster had become a surrogate father. The green box of metal supported him for a time, and then like his own Dad, wouldn’t lend a crumb. It liked to talk trash too, with newspapers soaked and dried in filth, yellowed and torn, filled with articles on the World Wide Wane. Often, Jake would shake his fist at the dumpster and say, "I'll give you a once in a century bust."
The lowest point came when the dumpster teased him with an article about his Dad. THE LATE LEWIS FARMER VINDICACTED, the headline proclaimed. Jake shook his head as he skimmed; his fists tearing at the paper. “Controversial temporal mechanics theory put to the test... experiments detect muon decay microseconds before particle generation... Farmer is to Einstein as Einstein is to...”
posted
"Vindicated" is misspelled in the newspaper headline quote.
In the first paragraph, "...box of metal..." sounds like the dumpster is full of metal. You might try, "...green, metal box..."
It seems like "...once in a century..." is a phrase he sarcastically quotes from news reports. If this is the case, you might emphasize the quote by placing it in single quotes, capitalizing it, hyphenating the phrase, or putting it in italics. That's a very minor matter of preference, because it doesn't necessarily need to be changed at all.
I'm utterly terrible with gerund phrases and participial phrases, but something about "...his fists tearing at the paper..." strikes me as being a subordinate clause, rather than independent. I will pour my blood into shark infested waters by suggesting that "...tearing at the paper..." is a participial phrase modifying "fists." In which case, you don't need a semicolon before the phrase, because a comma will do. Don't take my word for it, though, because I am not at all certain. (I should just clam up and not say anything, but I'm trying to learn...maybe opening my mouth will invite someone to correct me.)
I think you're quite safe leaving all of it as it stands (other than the spelling error), as the rest of the things I mentioned strike me as simple style differences. But you did ask.
In Jake Farmer's mind, Mr. Dumpster had become a surrogate father. <-- I had to go back and reread it to know this was a dumpster, not a man
It liked to talk trash <-- the pun threw me -- it doesn't talk trash the way a human does; I don't get it. Newspapers aren't trash-talk, are they?
Jake would shake his fist at the dumpster and say, "I'll give you a once in a century bust." <-- I'm not sure what this means. If he means he'll hit it, he'll surely hurt his hand, not the dumpster, and he knows it. Why does he say it?
his fists tearing at the paper <-- I can't tear at paper with my fists, and can't picture this
When I got to the newspaper articles about the physics, I thought -- so, is this what the story's about? I think you could start with a crazy man, but really, I'm not sure if Jake is crazy, fanciful, or living in a world with intelligent dumpsters. (I'm leaning toward "fanciful.")
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