Old thread: Try reading your own work aloud before posting. Keeping your thumb over unread words as you go can also help make it feel more like a first passthrough, and help catch potential misinterpretations. Posting in a copy-pasteable format is encouraged, but not necessary.
/crit/ - critique thread
Jackson Roberts
Other urls found in this thread:
is2.Yea
roryedd.com
youtube.com
twitter.com
Brayden James
Wendy's, the fast food chain. As I walked through the front doors, the weighty scent of fast food blew over me. I heard who must've been the manager tell a joke about somebody: "He didn't wake up until 1:30? Wow, I guess his life must be hard." But, what irony it had was indiscernible; his voice sounded genuinely empathetic. He was working the floor, in his fifties. Meanwhile, towards the front of the line, some girl in a cap was getting yelled at for not taking a custom order properly. I wondered, in that moment, which was worse: being the new girl, who was too young to serve fast food well, or being the old man who'd been trapped here long enough to get good at it.
Either way, it wasn't my concern. I was there for one thing and one thing only: Fernando. I sought his counseling in matters of love. At first I was worried he might not have shown up, but then, I saw him: a symbol, for sex symbols. He kept his polo unbuttoned, his hip length hair... in a hairnet, as was mandatory. He finished up a drivethru order via headset: "Oh no madam, I don't need a camera to see that. Yes, please, have a beautiful day--and pull around to the next window."
"Fernando," I said, having reached the front of the line.
"You are in need of something?" he asked, putting the headset around his neck. He knew I wouldn't eat fast food.
"Advice," I said. "I'm getting tired of being single, how do you do it?"
"Samuel, Samuel Samuel Samuel, Samuel. You want one to love, yes? Then, you must love them all. You must treat everyone, as though they were sexy."
Immediately someone shouted, "Where's my fucking BURGER?"
Zachary Flores
I posted a short story to /pol/ earlier and no one even read it. I feel like a loser, Yea Forums. Usually my short stories get tons of (You)s, but when I actually put effort into something, I get completely shut out.
is2.Yea Forums.org/pol/1568678828458.png
What's wrong with it? I'm a bit of an idiot who still hasn't learned proper syntax, but barring that I can't see what's wrong with it. So maybe I'm just a shitty writer.
Austin Brown
/pol/ doesn't read much. /pol/ on 8ch did, that's why they shut it down.
Brandon Harris
Let me know if this makes any sense.
Leo Wright
Sequel to Deal or no deal.
>The Unbearable Melancholy of Mr Blobby
As I sip at my fourth vodka gimlet overlooking the London skyline, I find myself yet again holding back the tears. Tonight marks the 27th anniversary of Mr Blobby, moronic mascot to the masses. And I miss it. I miss it so badly if I saw Noel again right now my tongue would dart so quickly up his arsehole trying to get him to cut me a break I’d be tasting his beard at the other end.
The cliches are all true. I am a trained Shakespearean actor. Well, I was I suppose you should say. “Barry Killerby, formerly Mr Blobby, commands the stage with dazzling erudition and forlorn dignity in this remarkable production of King Lear” - aye, I made my own bed and now I must sit in it. I haven’t had acting work since 2012.
The internet is a Pandora’s box. Back when the media intelligentsia had me as a poster child for their sneering hatred of all things plebeian, at least I could laugh it off as tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. Not anymore. I Google and those awful gibes immediately greet me, a reminder that even at my most successful I was a fraud and a failure. So what does that make me now?
The suit. I still have the suit. It’s stuffed in the hall cupboard below the boiler. Tonight when I get home I will try it on, as I do every anniversary, and relive my time as Mr Blobby. I will jump around the flat drunkenly dancing to my hit single on repeat. I will scream Blobby Blobby Blobby until the neighbours bang on the ceiling. Then I will wake up on the floor in the suit, the stench of sweat inside like stinking feet and burnt bacon, the material sticking to my skin; just like when I was in the spotlight again.
Suddenly I notice a handsome woman, must be early 40s, standing in front of me in her elegant black cocktail dress. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you - but don’t I know you from somewhere?”.
I knock back the dregs of my vodka gimlet and ask if she would like to join me for a drink.
Amusing little story, you kept a good balancing act of things going on, also Fernando’s advice isn’t worth dismissing.
Leo Morgan
“She is gold. She is my woman’s own heart. She is an archetype of that heart. Is in a connection to your organ. Is some blood in your veins. Is from your food. Is for your digestion. Is swallowed down for you. You do this because this is just for you. Making you good. The right examples doing it for you.”
Thomas Green
Will post my thing below.
I think there's some small linguistic missteps (the "who" in the first line, "a symbol, for sex symbols", the comma after "Then" in Fernando's line) but I'd keep reading. More Burgerpunk please.
Honestly the opening triple punch of eye fuck, Cheeky's pub and her new autobiography (what decade is this?) are pretty offputting. I also think your dialogue is in a weird place where's there's colloquialisms mixed with formal terms like "feigned" or the stuff in the narrative voice which is implied to show the character's opinion.
Not sure. This syphoning tumour business is confusing as a definition and sometimes I'm not sure which movements are metaphorical (inside the memory) and which are not (inside the corridor of the basilica). The idea, the data as currency thing and the medical debts, I like lots, but the setup with thundering waves and all that seems a weird fit for that sort of sci-fi.
I laughed, stinking feet and burnt bacon is good too. I think the Noel line is a little too long to work though, and surely cliche is the wrong word. The rumours? The tabloid stories? I can't think of a good replacement.
Anthony Bailey
I posted this in another thread once, but hey.
Last of all, he checked the attic. Not quite as fulsomely shadowed as the stairwell, the top floor of the house had its own sort of gloom to offer. The open doors along its central corridor let light in, but the various stacked items in the storeroom, the shelves of the empty bedroom and the occasional buckets or cleaning tools leant against walls all cast long and mutant shadows in different directions across the bare and beaten floorboards. The criss-crossing of those shadows gave it the feeling of a graveyard's grove.
There was something else though, another sort of light. That was why the shadows were so very long and so very strange – they weren't only cast from outside. At the far end of the corridor, there on the left, was the always-closed door. The white one with the padlock. He could see an outline of the warning sign on its door, though the black and yellow were now indistinct. Light was creeping out from the bottom of its frame. Were they the ones whose coughing had woken him?
Unsure again of his footing, he began to step down the long central corridor, hands against the walls, fingertip tracing a diagonal path across the space's inside. A sidestep for a miniature crate, a second not to bump into a leaning broomstick. He waited for a sound, a click or a clack or only the rustle of another person's movement behind the door, even something as soft as the sound of fabric on fabric. The only sound was his own breathing.
The boy came closer still, hearing nothing from beyond the door. It was warmer upstairs and his winter coat's collar pressed against his throat in a way that was no longer comfortable. He looked at the door, close enough to see that the heavy padlock his father had put on it really was missing, and for a second he considered whether to knock or else politely cough. Could there be somebody behind it listening to his steps and holding their own breath? Was the light on for some other reason? He was close enough to make out the “!” on the warning sign and remembered that a symbol like that could be for electrical current – a current that was running right at this moment. He wasn't sure any more if the door had ever been sealed with a padlock. For the first time ever the boy had a sense for the building as something dangerous, coursing with deadly electrics - a place where the vents could suck the air away from him or the walls suddenly tilt inwards then crush him. The fear felt instinctive – like that of a child who sees its first spider or snake and remembers an ancestral distrust. He felt as if laying a hand on the door would be be the beginning of something unnameable. He paused, then turned and left the roof-space, telling himself on the way downstairs that the sounds he'd heard had only been a dream.
Kayden Miller
>Mr Blobby
Thanks for the feedback. :)
The cliche I refer to was that old joke of a classically trainer actor taking on a role they see as far beneath them due to lack of paying work.
I think you do write suspense quite well but in such a short piece it was quite difficult to keep my attention. Perhaps reconsider quite how long you discuss the shadows.
Nathan Lewis
O, thine own nose
Why dost thou bleed?
‘Tis evidently in great need!
Thine crimson rivers overfloweth
As wine spilt from a goblet
And stain my neckerchief
As thou damsels stare in disbelief
O, thine own arse
Why dost thou farteth so?
Dispensing such malodorous fumes
In gaseous sulphuric plumes
As I prayeth in the chapel pews
May God forgiveth me
From his heavenly firmament
Leo Campbell
Thine means your, thou means you
Nathan Ross
Also, thou is necessarily singular. "Thou damsels" doesn't make sense
Landon Butler
Thou can kisseth my posterior m8
Jacob Adams
I'd like input on the various series of posts i've done I link to here
Julian Richardson
Adrian Mitchell
I wouldn't normally compare pieces but in some cases this almost seems like the opposite of the Blobby post. It's very well waxed and easy to move through on the line level, but it's not very compelling, nor does it build up well. It's a long piece that's short ranged.
First I mean this in the sense, that most of the jokes are just amusing word choice and/or sudden outlandishness. Either that, or the joke is just that something's dumb and you remind us of it, in a very "look, blockbuster!" referential fashion.
But I mean this in the second sense, that it's actually hard to keep track of stuff. I wasn't immediately sure which character you were talking about in the "Her lips" paragraph, and I wasn't sure if the next paragraph was divided from it for the sake of moving on to the other woman. Even you seem to lose things now and then: you mention the notion of Victoria feeling 16 twice, the second instance being almost a verbatim repeat as though you forgot you'd already told this joke, rather than as something which build off of prior material.
Oh yeah, I read this last thread and forgot to mention: what happened to this guy's wife? I recall she needed surgery, and that this was what drove him in the Noel thing, but now it looks like he's about to get Blobby on this woman. I'm not even sure these need to be tied together.
The tongue line makes me think "good job" more than it actually makes me laugh, which dampens the previous sentiment. That and "trying to get him to cut me a break" sounds like you, the author, having to make sure I get it. Which isn't to say I would get it without this, but it feels very obligatory.
Could be more polished. "at least I could" sounds better as "I could at least" with how you roll through it imo.
Josiah Miller
Thanks for feedback. Deal or no deal and Mr Blobby aren’t the same narrator so perhaps sequel is the wrong word - the only thing that ties both together is the involvement of Noel Edmonds in some way. Was thinking of a trio of short stories related to him, or more maybe. What can I say, he’s a constant source of inspiration. ;)
Re. the contestant’s wife in last story just imagine the worst, you know how in game shows sometimes there’s a sob story of why they need the money.
Angel Richardson
I think you understand syntax less than I do. Not an insult, btw, just an observation that explains your difficulty understanding the subject of my sentences. If in the previous sentence the subject is A, then the next subjective pronoun is also A.
I don't know how you could confuse Victorias infatuation for a 16 year old as Beatrice's "feeling" 16. You probably skimmed through the gigantic walls of text I scrawled out because you got bored (like everyone else who read it). Thanks for the critique anyway.
I think the most widely applicable criticism is that something just "doesn't work." I have a lot of novels I'm working on and I tried to mix a bunch of them together for a Yea Forums shitpost, but I didn't want to give any of my good ideas away.
Ryan Johnson
>which build
which builds*
Well I can say this photo seems pretty cursed now
>I could only focus on Adam.
Which is why he's given a whole one word of screentime in the smallest line of this paragraph?
My biggest issue is the tense. If she's forgetting these memories, how is she narrating herself having once had them? It's in past tense, but it relies upon being treated as though this were present tense, but it's also too elaborate for me to really believe that this is being narrated by someone who, in the present, is getting mindwiped by some machine.
Second biggest issue is the machine's motives. For what reason need these memories be wiped to be stolen? it's like the reverse of "You wouldn't download a car, would you?"
Lastly, the first three paragraphs. You repeat words on really odd frequencies, and dart around describing this and that. The motion feels less like crashing waves and more like playing Quake with 300 ping. What's more, your images aren't even bad. I'm seeing mostly black up until the flickering light, but pausing at any point still works. But when you play the footage it looks like a paroty of Studio Shaft's direction.
The "Oh no! There's a bomb in my head that makes my narration choppy!" type excuse doesn't even come in until the end of the third paragraph. I understand that this is partially on purpose, but it's too heavily contrasted by your long, descriptive lines. And the latter paragraphs are less choppy anyways, despite her supposedly being more and more afflicted by this issue as the story progresses.
Adam Morales
I look above the stars are bright
But I'm blinded by your light
Heaven seems so far away
Come back to me some day
The skies seem so blue
They lead me to you
Somewhere there's a place in my heart
In the skies of love
Cameron Roberts
>If in the previous sentence the subject is A, then the next subjective pronoun is also A.
Yes and if we pick people off the street, how many of them are going to adhere to this convention of yours? There's a difference between knowing how you, personally, write, and how people actually read. A better author can craft whatever conventions they like as they go. You're expected to speak in English, but you're not a lawyer writing in legalese. That's narrow minded.
>as a 16 year old girl.
user, this is no coincidence. I didn't skim, I just quit halfway through. With the amount of stuff like what I mentioned above, things like Victoria's infatuation for a 16 year old are going to get confused with Beatrice's "feeling" 16. If something you do doesn't work, the criticism you apply should not be "well, it just magically doesn't work, haha, what can you do?"
Cooper Butler
>Yes and if we pick people off the street, how many of them are going to adhere to this convention of yours?
People who understand grammar.
I've never seen a critic respond so poorly to criticism. LOL.
Julian Rivera
>People who understand grammar.
Yes, user, you're very good at opening and closing doors in the house you live in. But you don't seem to understand how to build one. By all means, keep building up more and more "good ideas" to keep in that ever growing balloon head of yours.
Joshua White
Honestly, your reply could use some work. You appear to shift between referring to my head as a house and as a balloon between sentences.
Liam Kelly
At least you're good at playing dumb.
Jose Lewis
It’s pretty insipid mate. Intentionally, I suspect?
If not read more poetry, listen to well written folk songs etc. before writing.
Camden Lopez
Kevin Torres
At least I'm good at what? I stopped reading your reply half way through. But it's bad.
Isaiah Bennett
Oh well, at least you didn’t write it yourself, well done then I suppose.
Mason Smith
>I stopped reading your reply half way through.
Good to know that people who drop 1035x4832 images of text are willing to return the favor.
David Ortiz
Writer user, you are totally wrong here. Look at your paragraphs. The first is all Victoria, the second all Beatrice, then you have Victoria's thoughts, another sentence about Beatrice, then a line of dialogue from Victoria, then a paragraph that begins with "Her...". Whether or not this is the perspective character we started the piece with is totally open to question. Especially if you're going to punctuate passages which begin by describing one character with lines of dialogue delivered by another.
Also, to describe a human as possessing the physiognomy of a human skeleton is very silly.
Jace Long
The intersecting dialogue does not change the subject of the previous sentence.
>Also, to describe a human as possessing the physiognomy of a human skeleton is very silly.
Oh no, I wrote a silly story! Back to the drawing board :^(
Alexander Mitchell
You are awful at taking criticism. Shut the fuck up and take it on the chin or don’t post in these threads.
Your story is absolute wank by the way and how pretentious to say “I don’t post the good stuff here” then go onto argue with people who didn’t like it.
Matthew Fisher
Quit samefagging, retard. You're pretending that more people agreeing with your stupid criticisms makes them better.
Cameron Lee
Jesus fuck.
> John was kind so he gave his apple to Paul. He had been looking so hungry.
Oh shit! I must have broken one of the fundamental rules of syntax!
Brody Watson
>Posters
>12
Camden Bell
You're going to call other people dishonest?
/:
The head isn't mentioned until the very end. There's no way you took the house to be your head, but you had to think up a complaint.
Charles Butler
No, I'm calling you a samefag. You're obviously an unemployed weirdo who started sperging out because something I said set you off. My first reply to you was completely cordial, but I disagreed with 1 (ONE) of your critiques and you wen't completely off the fucking walls.
It's honestly pretty pathetic.
>The head isn't mentioned until the very end. There's no way you took the house to be your head, but you had to think up a complaint.
I was making fun of you by purposefully misinterpreting what you said.
Nathan Morales
Maybe you'd be able to take other people at their word if you weren't so insincere, user.
Nicholas Rodriguez
>I was making fun of you by purposefully misinterpreting what you said.
So you otherwise didn't have anything to make fun of?
Jeremiah Young
I'm completely sincere. I even acknowledged my own shortcomings and the shortcomings of my story (it isn't compelling, like you said).
It's pretty obvious you're only here to feel like a God by handing down shitty critiques that you feel are above questioning.
Nicholas Wilson
I didn’t take the time to criticise your work properly as I could tell by the first paragraph I wasn’t going to enjoy it. These are my posts.
Now fuck off.
Alexander Thompson
Parker Diaz
The other posts wouldn't show if you were using a proxy, which you are. Except for this post which is posted RIGHT AFTER the timed interval Yea Forums makes you wait to post another post on this board.
Dominic Smith
actually, scratch the proxy. You're just on 4G.
Using multiple devices to samefag. Utterly pathetic.
Luke Reyes
Oh Jesus pal, using a proxy? Get a fucking grip. More than one person is finding your butthurt complaints tedious, is that really so difficult to believe?
You posted in a crit thread, you got criticised. What did you expect, the fucking Nobel Prize for Literature? Tosser.
Kevin Jenkins
maybe you think I, "unemployed," can afford two phones
Lincoln Long
>666 twice in the thread
Sebastian Wright
I don't know what the fuck it is. You samefagged at least once. You made multiple posts exactly within 1 minute and 30 seconds of each other.
Maybe you're his discord friend or some shit. Maybe you do have two phones. Maybe you spoofed a different operating system with some kind of app. I don't know. Dogpiling someone's post like that never happens outside of fuckery like samefagging and raids.
Logan Myers
user a broken clock can be right twice, see . Coincidences are especially likely to occur when you drag a conversation out as long as possible.
Bentley Kelly
Nope, I’m the Mr Blobby writer. Unless I planned this in advance and pretended not to get my own story knowing you would get angry about my criticism so I could produce this screenshot.. oh just give up.
I use 4g because my plusnet router is gash and can’t handle streaming on the TV at the same time.
Owen Lewis
Is your name Miles Layne Viele-Uehara?
Or is it Courtney?
John Long
>Nope, I'm the Mr Blobby writer
I pieced that together by the filenames.
Your story was shit, by the way. It read like a garbage copypasta. How this other faggot would compliment your story and insult mine is suspicious.
Isaiah Adams
Mine is funny, yours isn’t would be my guess.
Keep thinking you’re the next Will Self. :)
Samuel Cooper
Neither. But if those names are accurate, thanks for letting me know there are not two, but three people dogpiling you.
Ryan Mitchell
Or... he got his friend (whose shitty writing he conspicuously praised) to white knight him.
Just some fat guy and his fat girlfriend I ran into a while ago on Yea Forums. I forgot about him until something about your posts jogged my memory. He and you are similarly egotistical and confrontational. All three/four of you post primarily on phones and tablets, too. In his case, he got his girlfriend to white knight him.
As a final note, the British dialogue you've written under this iPhone using character is painfully stilted. It's either written by an American whose primary impression of how Brits speak come from television or a sheltered sperg who doesn't interact socially with the people he pretends to be in with online.
Daniel Fisher
I'm not blobby. Go back to Yea Forums.
Nolan Parker
(Me)
>I'm not blobby
or this "blobby" character from Yea Forums you speak of, lol. But it just dawned on me:
>How this other faggot would compliment your story and insult mine is suspicious.
I didn't put one over the other but good job showing some vulnerability for a change. Specifically, I told user:
>The tongue line makes me think "good job" more than it actually makes me laugh
That's not a compliment, you know. I also pretty much called his language stilted, as you have now, but I guess you missed that in your insecurity. Must be why you keep those ideas in that fat head of yours, and just assume your work failed magically rather than for a reason.
>Dogpiling someone's post like that never happens outside of fuckery like samefagging and raids.
See? You aren't even willing to consider these things possible, the thought hurts too much. So you project it out to the point of thinking everyone except you is arrogant, to the point of believing multiple posters from Yea Forums are the same group of people you met on Yea Forums.
Gabriel Watson
Please folks, can we just stop? This thread is pretty much ruined now.
Have a silly poem I wrote as a shitpost on The Student Room ten years ago. A friend turned it into a sort of Arab Strap style song, I might have a go myself.
>Romantic Poem (Contains Sex)
I lie naked on my back,
staring at the dusty yellow ceiling.
I know his eyes are glazing
over my body like honey
over a raw ham shank.
The mattress is damp
with sweat and encrusted
with semen stains.
Jeremiah leans over my abdomen;
he gawks at my breasts,
saliva running down his chin.
He takes off his wire frame
glasses then fixes his
beady black eyes into mine.
I feel the warm vapor
of his breath nestling on
my brow, then I sneeze.
He licks the mucus off my lips.
"Oh Jeremiah" I coo.
I close my eyes and feel
his rough ginger beard
and his ochre nose
slowly trailing down
my stomach, then,
his wet and flaccid
tongue entering me
like a cold snail.
I wait for a few minutes
whilst it nestles inside
my vagina, listening to
him breathe through his
stuffed up nostrils.
I accidentally let off wind,
but thankfully it's silent.
Then he resurfaces, coughing
and scraping my pubic hair off his tongue.
I sit up and inspect his penis
in its full priapic glory.
I imagine it entering me
at magnificent speed,
continuously thrusting.
I imagine it entering with
the force of the atom bomb on Hiroshima,
like the Eurostar through the channel tunnel.
"Sorry", he says,
"I don't have any condoms."
"Alright", I say.
We lie naked in silence,
turned away from each other.
In the corner, a decrepit
old black, brown and orange cat
lying on a deck of empty pizza boxes
watches us, purring,
like one of those cheap handheld
fans that you buy in holiday resorts.
Leo Martin
I was going to let you two have the final word but this is just ridiculous.
The criticisms you gave your friend/boyfriend here are like the criticisms SNL and CNN gave to Obama. You went full Trump with my story and asked the other guy "What happens next?" like some captivated children listening to an adult tell read them beddy-byes.
We're not having this flame war because of MY inability to take criticism. Remember, I accepted every criticism (although I didn't agree with them) except for one, which is that my grammar made my story confusing. My story is not magically bad. It's not even bad. But certainly "something doesn't work" because I didn't get any (You)s like I normally do. That criticism (something doesn't work) can be applied to most works of fiction that miss the mark. And what doesn't work is sometimes intangible and hard to find. You definitely didn't find it, and it's mostly due to your own ignorance (poor reading comprehension). Pointing that out made you angry.
I'm not reading any more of your replies. Goodbye.
I don't understand why it's presented as a poem when it's just prose. Maybe it's some kind of hipster shit.
William Watson
>It's not even bad.
Ryan Taylor
>Poem In Memory of Michael Jackson
(Written on hearing the news of his death)
Dear Michael,
the man with a child's heart -
I want you back.
You were still a pretty young thing.
No longer will you shake your body;
you were not unbreakable.
The way you make me feel
is like there ain't no sunshine now.
I cry lonely teardrops
in the closet
because you rock my world.
When I die and go to heaven, will you be there?
Some might have called you a smooth criminal,
but that's just human nature.
Everybody's somebody's a fool.
I think you are there,
your presence was enough to heal the world.
You were certainly not bad -
you were a lovely one,
better than dirty Diana who everyone mourned.
Yes, you got to be there,
Heaven or hell, regardless, when I come of age, and die,
I wanna be where you are
Hunter Baker
>In Memory of Kim Jong-il
(On hearing of his death)
Nineteen forty one.
The great one is delivered
By the hands of God.
His name: Kim Jong-il.
Leader of the universe
King of all free men.
Compassion unmatched,
Intelligence unrivalled
He stood ten feet tall.
Master of music,
Marxist dialectician
Watcher of movies.
A man? Perhaps not.
A God? Nobody can say.
He was just the best.
The evil west conspired
To destroy North Korea.
He would not let them.
His legacy is
The greatest country ever.
Will it prosper still?
Kim Jong-il was loved
By all and will be mourned for
Centuries to come
Fear not though comrades
For now he rests in heaven
I hope to see him soon.
Henry Baker
>Please folks, can we just stop? This thread is pretty much ruined now.
The argument was more entertaining than the work user submitted. I would sooner believe this thread was all one author than I would call good.
Owen Sanchez
There are no old men playing bowls
There are no young men scoring goals
Just empty parks, like gaping holes
Whilst the unemployed collect their doles
The young and old; the Brits and Poles
Alas, a mass, of decaying souls
Cameron Sullivan
Bump
Michael Russell
it would be a lot better without the commas
Samuel Smith
the fruit of my womb
are in full bloom
their smiles brighten my day
and as time passes by
im reminded that i must die
and this fills me with great dismay.
one day ill be defeated
soon ill be unneeded
will they forget the greatest gift i gave
while i dont know
whats yet to unfold
im sure it'll be okay
Luis Reyes
>the "who" in the first line
Oh, I think I see what this is. "I heard who must've been the manager" sounds like the speaker heard his identity or something about him secondhand, but then you reach "tell a joke" and have to recompile everything before the quote comes in. Is that right, or is this just another problem on top of it?
Would have liked a comma after "tools" or somewhere around there, depending on what you mean. I didn't see the list end, but then the sentence did. It might be better to put it after "walls."
>across
I don't know why this sticks out so bad for me. "Over" sounds better. Maybe it's matter of my vision panning down from the items on the wall, as opposed to sideways which would better match "across." There's also the fact that you have criss-crossing in the next line.
>so very
I didn't like this repeat. It's just throwing in short sounds that run against the so very long and strange shadows. The catch is that your "weren't only cast" bit mirrors the "so very long" cadence, so more changes would likely follow that one if you did it.
>the black and yellow
I've seen warning signs that weren't black and yellow. Just changing "the" to "its" would make this feel better to me.
>He waited for a sound, a click or a clack or only the rustle
You seem to mean "or even just a rustle," but "only a rustle" suggests to me that he might be waiting for only a rustle. As in, he might be waiting for nothing else, as though the click and clack were things he only might have been listening for and we just don't know or something. It suggests your "or" was exclusive rather than inclusive.
>upstairs and his
I would rather these were separate
>the heavy padlock his father had put on it really was missing
"was really" sounds better, or just throw "really" out entirely, I don't know.
>coursing with deadly electrics - a place where the vents could suck the air away from him or the walls suddenly tilt inwards then crush him
This was a good line.
>ancestral distrust
consider putting this before the spider/snake
>unnameable
ehhh
>had only been a dream.
"had been only" sounds better to me for some reason. I would rather have "only a dream" echo in my head than "been a dream"/"only been a dream."
Jayden Gonzalez
An eternal light so bright yet my loathsome eyes are not pained to see it.
Words bring the moment into focus but no string of sentence nor symbol can bottle up, for it is above, and within, without, and before.
It is what has been; brought and found, by the few that have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a will to accrue.
We bare its weight gladly, as it lifts the hurt from our backs.
We began with a cry and through father and mother we learnt the word, if only cats, and bats, and hats in our novelty.
The story of our lives strung out, tired, thinning, loosing towards the fated snap; all bottles will break, all words will be spoken, and all will bow on grateful knees.
Dark has the day become,
and long may we wait still in the morning; sodden yet sharp as blades of grass graced by night's dew.
Every drop shall be counted,
every root pulled up; those that closed all sense to the glorious present of Father and Son joined to the fate of the promised yield, will see the gleam and be brought to ash and fall between the crevices of stone, where light's shadow beams with sharp teeth and the whipcrack of malice.
The song continues to play, the words taking hold,
where was fire forgotten, now bursts with an affront to keep the cold defined, placed, reaching with stunted arms that know not the heat pumping in every like vein;
eyes closed yet seeing far:
Penetrating rain has had its day,
the warmth of kin,
darlings shared.
Palms grasped voices crossed, painted faces wiped clean,
the worst of ourselves fragrant no more.
Altogether, life wrung out, tried, tested, forged into shape from the pounding of our apprehension.
What monsters are we, smiling crookedly, wretched and filled with gratitude as,
All at once the light stops,
the multitude silent.
The weight of the world loosens,
our feet once nailed to the black ground lift with all we have seen.
The light we have but glimpsed takes shape.
Father and Son at the freshold of our Memories End.
Noah Barnes
the word dismay doesn't ring well for me. Otherwise its nice and simple
Carter Cooper
seems like this is missing an ending.