Holding back the sea, Gray

Five years before the Frost

If I am somewhere close, I think it is an interesting premise. The piece seemed tangled to me. I had to think about the Name, and am still wondering about it.

After you had established it as Mangrove Tomorrow's POV
"he, Mangrove Tomorrow, second", was not needed.

I am terrible with edits, but one of the pros will be by in due time with some good suggestions.

Once again, I like where you are going, if you need a reader for the entire piece, send it along.

The sentences seem to me to be excessively long. Sentence #1 - 27 syllables. Sentence #2 - 40 syllables. Sentence #3 - I lost count at about 70. Sentence #4 - 20 syllables; the shortest of the lot.

There is an essay entitled "The Neural Lyre", which indicates the human attention span for the spoken word is approximately 3 seconds, which is roughly the time it takes to speak 10 syllables. Since we process words with the same brain areas, whether written or spoken, the same seems to hold true, in my opinion.

This is not to imply that ALL sentences must be 10 syllables or less, but it might be helpful to give your reader a moment or two of rest along the way.

url for "The Neural Lyre" http://joelorr.squarespace.com/the-neural-lyre-poetic-meter-t/

In the original draft I did two things differently than what I posted. The first was that I started with two long, largely irrelevant epigrams that I felt it wise to trim. In retrospect, I should have replaced them instead, because there is no other helpful way to start the story, as it's sadly obvious that I'm omitting a vital piece of context with which everything would more sense (I hope.) What would you say if I had started the story with this quote:

<i>"In the year [40 AF] the Corporation unvieled its most hubritic project yet, the creation of a sentient non-human race, allegedly revived dinosaurs, whose telepathy and disparity between months-long physical and intellectual maturation rates and decades-long psychological and sociological maturation rates made them ideal to serve as brain-linked servants to those few humans viewed worthy and compatible. To ensure the appeareance of basic compassion and the fact of greater demand, most raptors would be allowed to live free, extremely public existences. I am alone in seeing this clearly. All of my clutch-mates think I am insane for even thinking about these things, though they know them, too. The reason is clear: our minds are built for long meandering evasion and denial, human's for short blunt secrets and lies"</i>
Flax Equinox, private log dated [13 BF]
destroyed by Mangrove Tommorow, [12 BF]

I think Mangrove is one of the Raptors, one of the early models, if I follow the lab language. He works for or is somehow in the power of, the corporation that created the Raptors. I presume he is quite intelligent, both from the word choice of the text and the mention that he was the "architect" of the zigarat, which could mean the designer or a more general use of the word, like it was his idea.
He isn't happy about being called to corporate.
He is afraid of the corporation.
Some sort of problem with the "haunted zigarat" put him out of work.

After Juraseic Park, we all think "dinosaurs" when we hear raptor, but I don't know if that's what Mangrove is, or not, from the text.

In some cases, the big words are necessary, when you're talking about technical specifications, etc. In others, they aren't--they just make the sentence sound bumpy and exclusive.

Also the term "raptors" left me a little confused becuase you later reference dinosaurs. When I think of raptors - my first thought is that of present day birds of prey, not dinosaurs.

The idea is interesting, it just takes too much effort to go through it.

[This message has been edited by nitewriter (edited February 24, 2008).]

Kathyton, you are right on most of the particulars, and I agree that perhaps more action is what I need in this story, which does seem to have too much exposition.

That being said, I have come to he conclusion that I should rework the opening to a different (human or post-human) POV because I was playing off the idea of viewpoint by writing each character in a characteristic style. Or at least, reflecting alienness by writing in an alien manner. Please tell me if you think that, if you knew this, it might be easier to understand, or at least appreciate.
This idea was actually one of the two immediately relevant points of the second introduction. I guess the problem with that one was that it presented the most immediately important fact (Raptors have minds that are geared towards supression, think in ways that don't directly follow from language, and love long, complex parentheticals) subtly and at the end of a laundry list of things that sound cooler. And that list was tainted in that I was still writing it the way a raptor would.

This clearly needs work. Here's a completely different introduction:

Five years before the frost
J.J., post-human egoist guru and post-doc prodigy psychohistorian, sat at the food court, chopsticks nimbly picking peas from stir-fry in his right hand, stylus angrily scribllng a rant in his left. The neural upgrade was worth it.

Oh, but wait, the projections came back from the Taefl. The e-paper pinged silently the message. A deft flick maximized it over his most recent letter to the Thirteen and his faithful followers. They could wait another few years...

First, welcome to ouy disfunctional little family. Second, I think you probably have great idea for a story but it is suffering from 2 main issues, IMHO,

1)Info Dump - you are hitting us with too much information too soon. While this is a short story and you don't have a lot of time to develop the world, you still need to give the reader information in a way we can "gronk" while reading.

In the first version we are being told what Mangrove isn't thinking about. Why? Show me what he's thinking/feeling.

In the second version - we get a history lesson about the Corporation. Mangrove wouldn't write the history lesson in his journal. He knows it, so the information is being spoon fed to the reader, ie info dump. At the end there is a hook - "All of my clutch-mates" but I've tuned out before I get there.

The the third version - JJ, an entity with an impossibly long title, is having lunch and again, thinking about things he wouldn't naturally think about so you can tell the reader.

This one's a bit touch to chew too because you have at least fifteen new concepts: (1) post-human, (2) egoist, (3) post-doc, (4) prodigy (in this context); (5) psychohistorian; (6) neural upgrade; (7) Taefl; (8) e-paper; (9) maximized; (10) Thirteen; (11) his followers; (12) Beekeeper; (13) Jones; (14) seed the earth with raptors; and (15) frost. IMHO, this is too much for a reader to take in.

2)Nothing is happening. What's happening now? Why are we being told this story?

All that happens in the first version is - Mangrove Tomorrow walked down the hall at Corporate Headquarters.

The second version - is a journal entry and nothing happens. There isn't even the tension of walking down the hall.

The third version - JJ is eating and he gets a message that makes him wonder about what two other entities are thinking about.

Also, in the third version - in a world with people named Beekeeper, Taefl, Thirteen, it seems odd someone is named "Jones."

What happens in the story? Jump to something that happens. What happened at Mangroves's meeting?

Try this new version of the third entrance. I'd like to think it addresses the major problems of the last attempt, and even helps give some context for the Mangrove scene. What do you think of the chacterization of J.J. though?

Five years before the frost
J.J., sat alone at the food court, nimbly picking peas from stir-fry with chopsticks in his right hand, stylus angrily scribllng an egoist manifesto in his left. The neural upgrade was worth it, he gloried in the sleek power of his post-human body.
The tablet pinged silently that he had a message. A deft flick of the stylus brought it up on the screen. Excellent. The problem he had entered on the Taefl had come back. At 25, he was already a post-doctoral student of psychohistory, which, at least in his mind, meant the machine-assisted divination of mysteries.
Nearly two lifetimes, 40 years, ago crazy old Beekeeper and Dr. Jones, who wouldn't take a post-human name, had, were desperate to prepare against the Last Frost of Winter. They needed

We still have someone eating and writing and then pausing to think an info-dump about the world. Stop telling us and start showing us. Maybe have JJ interact with someone in a way that shows us some of these things. Also, you don't need to tell us everything at once. Tell us only what we need to know right then to understand what's going on right then and work the rest in later as it's needed to understand what's going on then.

Here is what I was thinking as I read your first thirteen:

What is a post-human body? Does it look exactly the same as a human body? What makes it post-human? I can't visualize this fellow at all--is he human-looking, dinosaur looking, a big ball of energy, or what? (Answer these questions, but show us rather than give us a dissertation on what the word means.)

What is an egoist and why is he writing a manifesto? Does this mean he's trying to start a religion based about him or "oneself"? Why is this important? What is a neural upgrade? Is he a robot? Did someone implant him with a new brain? Why do post-human bodies have "sleek power"? I assume that means he's not built like a body-builder, but it does imply that all post-humans have a set, unchanging body-type. How can a tablet silently ping (since "ping" seems to indicate a noise)? Is Taefl a message board, an internet site, the new name of the internet, a planet, or what? Why do I care that he's a post-doctoral student of psychohistory, and what is psychohistory anyway? (Is there any way to show this, like with someone interacting with him, instead of him thinking about his age and credentials?) What is "machine-assisted divination of mysteries"? At this point, I've stopped trying to process another set of meaningless (to me), confusing terms and have stopped reading.