Quincunx Posted November 10, 2006 Report Posted November 10, 2006 http://www.patrickdurham.net/themightypen/index.php?showtopic=15035 Single-author short story (heading towards novella). This piece has been polished until it shines: there are no grammatical errors*, there are no inconsistences of style, and the separate postings are cohesive enough to make me wonder if the entire story hasn't been written out in advance. Only the erratic posting dates let me know that this is being written as we read it. Its plot is one-dimensional, too much so for my taste, but just deep enough for the "young adult" market which I think this will enter. The September pieces were slender, but had a mixture of conversation and description--while I craved a bit more, there was still enough to frame the conversation. In the October and November posts, there's not enough description, and I'm wandering blind through the conversation. Whether this can be fixed by sprinkling another few sentences of bare-bones description across the posts, or by reworking the entire story's dry, lab-report style into something a bit more lush, I can't decide; lusher description would make the story more engaging, but I believe that Kikuryu's chosen bare-bones as something easier to polish--or to sell as an abstract, and then to rewrite as a bulkier novel. *I salute your mastery of "-ly" adverbs. I had to search for them specifically to notice that you'd even used them.
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