GFF Literary Workshop: Week 6

Week 6: Closed

Welcome to the rotating literary workshop here at GFF. Each week will feature a new piece of member-written literature for you to critique and constructively criticize. Download and read the work at the bottom of this post, and offer your comments! The event will continue as long as there are submissions in the queue, so be sure to nominate and participate!

Comment Rules
There are no rules per se, but all comments are expected to be mature and within the bounds of common decency. The key is to be as helpful as possible to allow the author to improve their work.

Each work will be open for comments for one week, starting on Monday and ending on Sunday.

Submission Rules
The workshop is open to any and all GFF members; simply post in the thread and ask to be added to the queue. New participants are automatically placed at the top of the queue to allow them a week to prepare a submission.

Please send all submissions to orion_mk2@yahoo.com. Be sure to include your GFF username, preferably in the subject line. Submissions can be sent at any time, and will be held until your next turn in the queue.

Length
Submissions are limited to prose (stories) for the time being. They should be no less than 500 and no more than 5000 words long.

This is just a guideline; submissions slightly over the limit may be allowed. Sections of longer works are also permitted.

Format
Submit work in .doc, .txt, .rtf, or .pdf format.

Submissions don't have to be written especially for the workshop; feel free to submit anything you've got lying around already.

Queue:
RainMan
orion_mk3
Acro-nym
Ozma
Phone
The Wise Vivi
Ayos
Helloween
Dark Nation


People in bold have submitted work for their week. If you have not submitted anything by the time your week begins, you will be moved to the bottom of the queue and the next participant who has submitted will go.

This Week's Submission
Estrelas Part 1 by Dark Nation
Prose, 1300 words

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Uh, okay. Thanks for your input.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I guess this is a story in progress? I hope so, both given the "Part 1" and the dangling story elements.

I would like to read the rest when it's completed, as I have enjoyed what you've provided. Now, on the critiques. It wasn't clear early on that it was a futuristic setting. Perhaps that's your intent. I'm accustomed to being unsure of the time period and just letting the story work itself out, but I'm not sure how many readers do the same. Is this a tale on Earth? It's unclear. I do like the characters and you do a good job of establishing them and making us feel for them a bit. I also like the foreshadowing of Shiner perhaps about to make the same mistake father did. Nyx no doubt plays a part. Speaking of Nyx, what does she do in the ship? At one point, she's disappeared and the next she's affecting the ship's controls and Shiner is talking to her. I'm a bit lost there.

And here's a few minor corrections/quibbles:
...they had fought in the war... seems ambiguous to me. I would prefer you say that they were killed. As it is, it kind of implies all those who were involved in the war ended up dead. That may be the case, but it isn't clear.

Something I was all too happy to oblidge with. Unless we're dealing with an alien dialect (and if we are, since it's possible, ignore my grammatical comments), that's a typo.

"What do you mean, you knew I was taking off today!" Wouldn't a question mark work better than a comma here? Those two statements seemed independent of each other, although related.

As I climbed aboard, the famililar scent of the cabin filled my senses. It should read familiar. Or maybe familial, if Shiner has experience with this ship.

Nyx was setting herself up a place to sleep in the crew cabins. This sentence just seems a little awkward to me.

"Woah!" That could be a word common in that era, but I can't see any pronunciation difference from "whoa". So, if it's not a typo, I don't see the point.

Also, the dialogue might be a little hard to follow. Separate pieces have a tendency to just flow together in spots given that the only divisions are quotation marks. It's not a big concern, as it doesn't happen much (and may not happen at all depending on the reader), and it's clearly an individual style. That's just my thought.

Anyway, overall it's a good story. It lays out the plot, adequately establishes the characters, includes some intrigue and the potential for action, and a little more. You kept me wanting more, and more I anticipate.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Thanks for the review. Maybe someone else can throw in their two cents? Yes, it is a story in progress. I would have written more but I wanted to get this in (relatively) on time. So I cut the story short at a nice spot

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I don't know. I didn't really think up anything to contructive to say about it. But I think it's a good story so far. It definitely has potential.

I did notice that the section of dialogue between him and his uncle seemed a little awkward word wise. Maybe read it through a couple times, and see if you can't replace some words here and there to smooth out the readability.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Here's my two cents on Estrelas Part 1:

The first thing that jumped out at me is really a nitpick more than anything else: "take control of your father's reigns." If you're referring to the thing that steers a horse, it should be "reins;" if you're referring to a monarch's rule, it should just be "reign," singular. Now that that's out of the way...

It seems clear (at least to me) that you're aiming for a futuristic setting, and trying to avoid the portentous exposition that often accompanies such stories ("it was the fifth year of the third era or the reign of the Star Kings" and such). This is very commendable, even if there are a few things I was curious about (the protagonist's age, how they wandered the cosmos before they ever "drove" a ship, etc).

There's not a whole lot of motion in the story; it seems very much like the first part of a longer tale, which is fine. I think that a little more of the protagonist in the tale couldn't hurt; after all, it's in the first person and that's one of the form's great strengths. As an (apparently) young person, they're bound to have strong feelings on a variety of subjects, which can help paint a more complete picture of the world without ponderous exposition--I'd like to see some more of that.

As a fragment, it's kind of hard to suggest a future direction, aside from the things that I always like to see such as further character development. I'd like to see an expanded version of this.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I think it's a good launching point for a bigger story (no pun intended).
I'd like to see where it goes, definitely. I think, if you can, you should write Part 2 for the next go-around. (if Orion is planning another cycle of this Workshop that is)

As for the gripes I had with the story, I think Acro-nym pleasantly sums them up. It felt kind of rushed is all, and I noticed a lot of those little errors too. Granted, some authors have their own style and purposely leave errors in their writing, but I'm guessing that in this they were just overlooked.

One thing I'd like to see next time is more backstory. The setting feels pretty hollow as it is now so flesh it out a little bit. Maybe a description of the locations, the worlds, the space craft, or the characters that you have in mind put on paper. That'd really work for the story's favor, definitely.

FELIPE NO