Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29709755-20160821074606/@comment-28266772-20160823134807

9251503

I'm getting transferred tomorrow. I'll be working on the OP feeding the intake. I'm not very happy about it. I'll be working shit hours doing shit work for shit pay. It's dirty and hot and dangerous and most importantly the people who work there are fucking idiots. I don't wanna listen to their shitty conversations and their shitty music or get trained by someone who can't wipe his own ass without getting shit on his balls. '[huh… this guy isn’t ranking very highly on the ‘emotional maturity’ chart here. Don’t know if that’s intentional or not but this last line just feels silly.]'

All that aside, I'll be working near the hub in the low gee [couldn’t he just write ‘g’] sector. No matter how many times I make the transition it fucks with my equilibrium and makes me nauseous. I gave up on ever getting used to it.

9251504

Today was my first shift at the intake. I don't like it. The first half of the day I was working in vacuum and I didn't have a compression suit so I had to use someone's spare.The [punctuation] barges come to the bay on a track that runs from the HZ through open space. [You should make it clear what HZ means] They're all covered in green paint and rust and they've got bales of waste strapped to them and the workers load them one after another into the airlocks.

I spent the first half of the shift drifting across the bay corralling barges then after midshifts I worked with the loading crew. '[this description of the intake job should probably be put up with the sentence that states he did it for the first half of the day. Otherwise there’s the repetition of ‘for the first half I did X’] 'I thought it would be more pleasant since they're on the other side of the airlock but then I realized they smell everything that comes in. First there was a load of frozen sewage, then ten tons of rotten apples that stank of sweet sticky vinegar and wet mold, and then a load of corpses killed raiding a refinery last week. Some of the bodies had big holes blown in them and there was one that got crushed, probably by a fire door, and the stomach wall had split open and the guts were tangled in the delatching [apparently this is not a word] mechanism. The loaders lopped them off and sent the barge back with little tassels of intestine stuck to it.

The machine is too loud and the smell makes me sick, the low gee is messing with my equilibrium. I got a headache that just got worse and worse. It still isn't gone. [this last sentence feels tacked on]

9251607

I had a fucked up dream last night. At the start there was nothing but blackness and silence, like I was floating at the bottom of the ocean, then the noises began. They were deafening; the sound of metal on metal, grinding and tearing and smashing against itself, motors roaring and the sound of squealing metal, and the rhythmic noise of steel hammers colliding, ripping and tearing and pulling apart with dull squelching thuds, then all at once it stopped. There was nothing again for a long moment, then a point of light. It got brighter and brighter, it hummed then it buzzed, as it expanded it made the sound of a thousand people screaming all at once, and filled the nothing with burning fiery light. It was the Collective.

I heard a rumor that the OP [what the fuck is the OP man?] gets in your dreams if you work there too long, fucks with your perception. Lots of loaders end up getting pulled in by the hammers.



9251704

I tried to keep my work uniforms separate from my civvies so the smell wouldn't get on them. It didn't do any good though. My clothes stink of rot. It might matter, if I had the energy to go somewhere when I got back to my quarters. Or maybe if someone came by once in a while. Laying on my rack, alone, eating First Strike Rations in the dark, the smell doesn't matter so much. I no longer notice it.

9251805

I keep having the dream. The light speaks to me now, [but] when I wake up I never remember what it said.

When I woke up [repetition/redundant] this morning I remembered something I thought of when I was a kid, when I would take baths alone at night in the old yellow bathtub and it would be so quiet it would make my ears buzz and there was one little yellow bulb in the room that wasn't bright enough and left shadows in the corners.

<p class="MsoNormal">I would look up at the tiny black square of the window, or down into the drain, or any of those places that stayed hidden in the dark and imagine something without form concealing itself there, staring out at me, waiting to reach out a tendril and grab hold of me, and squeeze me in to the claustrophobic little spaces inside the pipes, or crush me until I fit through that window, and drag me down forever, and I would fall into the black and become nothing. I was afraid to sit on the toilet, I knew if I did an enormous hand would reach up behind me, rest it's palm on the top of my head and pull me down and I would never see the light again. The though was so excruciating it would make my eyes water. I would be alone forever with the Nothing. [I don’t think that should be capitalized because it’s not a proper noun]

<p class="MsoNormal">It is disturbing to me in the extreme the effect my dreams are having on my waking life. I'm having a hard time going to sleep. I don't want to be alone in that empty room, all the lights shut off and the window blacked out. It's better than the people, the crowds, the feeling of being unwanted. Fuck em.

<p class="MsoNormal">   I suppose it isn't just the dream though. It's the stories about people feeding themselves into the ship's recycler. I wonder if they had the dream. Maybe they wanted to be part of the Collective. '[what the fuck is the collective? You gotta actually introduce these proper nouns you’re throwing around the place]'

<p class="MsoNormal">There are more sensational ones, told to me by people with too much enthusiasm and not enough linguistic ability to convey a narrative, though I can usually intuit what they're trying to get across. Sick little stories of the slurry inside the recycler moving on it's [its] own, sending itself down pipes where it didn't belong. It sounds a lot like the things I was afraid were hiding in the dark when I was a kid. [now the story feels like it’s picking up.]

<p class="MsoNormal">9251808

<p class="MsoNormal">We had another load of bodies today, more Factionalists. '[Okay see what I mean? Who are these guys?] The barge pilot told us they were holed up against the hull and some Engineers [engineers] cut loose a shield plate and blew em [‘em]' out into vacuum. They were all freezer burned and oozing chunks of bloody stuff from their noses. I was working Vacuum [vacuum – a lot of these things are not proper nouns] side so I didn't have to bag-and-tag, but I really don't like the way the parts sometimes drift off. Just spinning slowly, further and further into the black.

<p class="MsoNormal">I wonder how many corpses have been fed in the OP since it's been colonized. We process everything organic here. Corpses, sewage, rotten food, agricultural waste, fish heads. No matter what gets fed in one end of the recycler it always comes out looking like that paste they make hot dogs out of. I think there's a lesson in that.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260104

<p class="MsoNormal">I need a woman. I want to feel the heat of her skin and her insides so hot they burn and feel her skin get slick with sweat. The smell of her, the taste. The movement of her body, the pulsing of the life inside of her. Even the idea of lying next to a woman, of being in a woman's bed and sleeping there, it's making the core of me tremble. There's this strange empty feeling that's been growing lately. I feel like a cannonball shot a hole through my guts.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260108

<p class="MsoNormal">The Collective talked to me in my dream last night. It told me I would never be alone.

<p class="MsoNormal">I've felt alone ever since the accident. Whenever I think about it I get this numbness in me and the blood rushes to my head and makes my ears buzz, and I can't remember anything but how black the blood was and the way the head was turned towards the sky and staring out at nothing with no eyes to see and no face to look out from. There was nobody else. I was alone then and I will always be alone. [what accident?]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260109

<p class="MsoNormal">I hadn't thought of the accident for a while. I remember when they sent me to recover the body. The impossibility of approaching that mangled black heap, the blood so thick on the floor it had cracked like dried mud, and the way it glistened, like a sea of tar on a nightmare planet, the waves stirred up frantic by the wind from raging fires.The [punctuation] video from the helmet recording. Trying to untangle himself, looking down at the hopeless mess, and the roar, getting louder. His breath shallower [there needs to be a verb between breath and shallower] til [until] he began to moan with each exhale, then to scream. The rushing getting closer, so loud it ruptured the diaphragm in the mic, and the final moment of approach; a black, crushing, silent wall.

<p class="MsoNormal">The way he lay, his face was gone but the ragged black hole, it was pointed right at me. If he'd had any eyes they would have been staring right into mine.I [punctuation] feel nightmares coming closer to reality. Shadows seem to lean in when they see me pass by.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260110

<p class="MsoNormal">All day today I felt something behind me, staring at the back of my skull, never touching me, turning when I turned, never stirring from that spot just behind me and never blinking even once. I knew it was there, staring with giant, dull, dessicated [desiccated] corpse eyes and huge inky black pupils sunk into a tiny soft skull with skin of ash on a tiny, frail neck, floating there behind me. '[some of this wording is awkward, and not very functional. It creates a great mood, but the description itself is not very clear. Plus the sequence of events is not clear. What, exactly, is watching him? His imagination? The monster? The collective? Why has it suddenly got a description? And how can it have one when it’s constantly hiding behind him? How can he see it?] 'Wherever I went I felt the shadows flex and warp and distend themselves to get closer to me. There was something in the shadows [repetition] that had come from the nothingness to watch me. If I ever got too close it would grab hold of me and pull me away from the light of the world and the substance and matter and warmth of life and dissolve me into itself and I would become nonexistent. I don't want to go, to end up mangled and rotting and black. I don't want to have no face.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260110

<p class="MsoNormal">I broke in to the Pacific level last night, after third shift was on. I wanted to stand on the cliff where the mountains met the ocean. I like the cold air that rushes up the cliff every time a wave crashes. I like the deep blue color of the sea and the way the facets of the waves on the surface catch the starlight and scatter it back, and the way the water shimmers in the wind like a liquid mirror. I like looking out at the horizon and imagining it goes on forever and merges with the stars. When I looked straight down to the waves crashing against the jagged stones I saw the blue-black sea welling up towards me and the foam showing turquoise in the water.

<p class="MsoNormal">I left the cliff for the peak of the mountain. When I lay on the grass and stared up I felt the land curving away from me and the sky sucking me up, like I was going to fall into space. The sky is endless, it is so beautiful and horrible. '[Okay so this level of confusion is actually grating. Where the fuck is this guy? Space? Earth?]'

<p class="MsoNormal">9260205

<p class="MsoNormal">I can't sleep any more. Whenever I do that fucking nightmare comes back. Whenever I try to lie down I feel something watching me. There is a shadow moving in the corner of my eye just far enough away that I can't see and when I turn to look it's always gone. I pushed my rack up against the wall and now I sit in the corner with my knees tucked up underneath my chin and watch the room all night. I stare out at the darkness and see dead bodies with no faces lying in the shadows. I feel like something horrible is about to happen.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260206

<p class="MsoNormal">I heard in the early days of space travel the Soviets launched people into space in secret and all that was ever heard from them again were a few weak and scattered radio signals accidentally picked up by receivers in Europe. There was one transmission that was just the sound of someone breathing and his heartbeat, and as the source of the transmission went deeper and deeper into space the breathing got shallower and the heart rate got slower until the tower that picked up the signal lost contact with it. I don't like space. [I’m going to put a pin in this entry, and the one above, and come back to them at the end]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260207

<p class="MsoNormal">I can't concentrate during the daytime. I have grown terrified of the dark. I can't take showers because I see the eyes in the drain, I see the tendrils, s l o w l y [this sort of stylistic flourish is cheesy as shit] wrapping themselves around my legs and pulling me in a little closer each time.

<p class="MsoNormal">Daydreams are the only thing I can concentrate on. I used to think of being saved, I'd imagine a beautiful woman, a fuck-mother to nurse me, a fuck-daughter to need me, she will save me from the nightmares and the numbness and the sick feelings I get when I think of things. Just what every woman wants. A person who stinks of rotting corpses.

<p class="MsoNormal">I think of becoming something beyond feeling pain. I want to become a beast from the Nothing, so when the Nothing comes there won't be anything for it to take. When I am alone at night in the dark corner I think of these things. I wish to become the Nothing man. '[You’re making a big deal of this guy’s depression. Doesn’t feel… sincere. Does he want to escape, or immerse himself in this misery?]'

<p class="MsoNormal">9260304

<p class="MsoNormal">Have you ever been listening for something really hard, then you thought you heard it but it was just your imagination?

<p class="MsoNormal">I see the shadows moving. There are a million tiny kaleidoscopic points of light hiding in the darkness that make strange and fantastic forms. I hear whispers in the drains. They tell me I don't have to be alone, I can be with them. [Let’s just add this entry to the pinned ones above.]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260304

<p class="MsoNormal">They tell me I am losing weight. Rapidly. I got sent to medical, then the Naval Hospital. They recommended I drink more protein shakes. Excellent use of 17 hours.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260402

<p class="MsoNormal">I remember the last time I saw Jessica. It was night time. We were lying on her rack together naked with the lights on and staring at the ceiling. I talked about the memories, black pools of blood and the face that was just a gaping hole and the way I felt nothing now and how my insides were filled with liquid hate that was burning up my humanity and leeching the life from my soul, and the nightmares of sickness and black night eating away at the light of the world and leaving me alone forever in the dark. She surmised that if I didn't have any feelings then I didn't love her. It's nice to know people will be there for you. '[To be fair this guy feels like a whiny prick. I’d break up with him too.]'

<p class="MsoNormal">9260410

<p class="MsoNormal">The collective is dragging me towards the intake. I can feel it. The blackness is emanating from inside. I don't want to go in there. I see my face being torn in half by the hammers, the hot coppery blood and the organs ripped out and crushed to little bits, then the mills grinding me down into little chunks, then mashing the chunks into hot dog paste and I feel the little bits of me all crying out in fear of the loneliness that overtakes them as they are fed into the tanks where everything is cold and eternally dark and they fade away and melt into the collective. I am afraid I will get too close to the hammers and they will grab hold of me and suck me in to the machine. The recycler is calling to me. [This guy is going to kill himself… the story doesn’t really need to signpost itself so much]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260505

<p class="MsoNormal">I want someone warm and soft that will hold my head in her lap and put her arms around me to comfort me with her warmth while I cry, and let everything that's evil inside ooze out until I am empty, and she will suck the badness out of me when she holds her lips against mine. She will be beautiful and gentle. I will feel her vitality radiating from her and I will draw new life from it. I tried to get in touch with Jessica. I told her I was dying. She didn't believe me. [Another entry to add to the pinned list]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260506

<p class="MsoNormal">I am so full of hatred. I feel it in my guts, like I've swallowed molten lead and it's burning through my intestines. My insides are numb. Nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore. The only feelings I have now are fear and hatred. Everything is turning black. I think I'm fading away. [And another]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260507

<p class="MsoNormal">I want hatred to burn through me, until I feel no desires and no pain and my wrath is all that there is in the world. I will walk with great strides and my footfalls will shake the earth beneath me. I will hunger eternally, and I shall eat food in great heaping fistfuls and tear away at hunks of bloody flesh, and I shall drink the wine in huge swallows, and the men who stand in opposition to me will crumple into heaps of torn flesh and shattered bones and all that they were and are will be cleansed by the purifying fires and I will eat their children and fuck their women. I will take women and they will desire me to take them and I will fuck and fuck and my lust will never be sated. I will never sleep, and I will never die. [The usual internet commenter’s psyche summed up here brilliantly]

<p class="MsoNormal">9260508

<p class="MsoNormal">I went back to Pacific Level again last night. I climbed down the cliffs and leapt off into the empty air and fell down into the water and the waves were crashing all around and so loud and when I opened my eyes the salt burned and everything was tumbling white froth and blue sea and horrible black emptiness above and beneath and I paddled out and out until the waves weren't crashing around me and I went further until I heard nothing but the hum of the turbines when I held my head under the water and in the silence and emptiness I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the sky until I went numb from the cold that was leeching away my vitality and I forgot that I was, and I dissolved into the endless ocean.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260601

<p class="MsoNormal">I think something is broken.

<p class="MsoNormal">I have the dream when I am awake. I see that it is not a dream but a vision. It is a view to the life of the Collective that will one day consume every soul.

<p class="MsoNormal">I see the light all around and feel the warmth of all the souls joined as one and their joy fills my heart until it hurts and the feeling makes my eyes water and when it fades I see the shadows that are too dark and the emptiness and sorrow that fills my chest as the happiness drains away and I see the tendrils reach out and draw me ever inward. The shadows are overtaking me. They are robbing me of my light.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260605

<p class="MsoNormal">I hurt. I want somebody to fix me. I wish people wouldn't go away.

<p class="MsoNormal">The collective is pulling me in closer. I see myself being crushed over and over and over again. I think it's trying to desensitize me. I think it's working.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260608

<p class="MsoNormal">The collective is following me. The visions are getting stronger and more vivid, they keep up at night when I'm back in my quarters. They get worse. It has sent filaments through the drains and up into my room and it insinuates evil thoughts into my consciousness. I cant' [can’t] tell what is real any more. When I'm at work I see the intake lit with a golden luminescence and I feel the same joy as I do in my visions. Dreams flow into wakefulness now. I hear the voices calling all as one and speaking to me in no language of the joy of the Collective and the endless power of our perfect unity.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260609

<p class="MsoNormal">I've got to get away. There is a presence here that is eating away at me. I'll be leaving and never coming back. It's the only way to get away from the Collective. To go somewhere where it can't get to me. Maybe once I'm free I'll stop having these fucked up hallucinations and waking nightmares and I can get better. I don't know where I'll go. Maybe I'll hide out with the Factionalists in one of the zones they control, they're cut off from OP, or I can stow away on a cargo shuttle to groundside. I know they say it's uninhabitable but there are still lights from the cities you can see at night and fires in the day and the lights are supposedly just run on automated systems that would take centuries to burn out and the fires are from the dead forests burning but what if they're wrong and there are people down there and women and men and skies that don't pull you in and I can really find an ocean that goes on forever

<p class="MsoNormal">9260701

<p class="MsoNormal">I left my quarters before my shift started [full stop] They won't send anyone looking for me. I went to the Industrial Zones and tried to hook up with some Factionalists. If I could get away things might get better.

<p class="MsoNormal">The presence of the collective is gone. I though [thought] it would help my mental state if I didn't spend all my time locked in my quarters or staring at the intake and watching myself being dragged in and torn up by the hammers and seeing those nightmares take over my waking life but now I just feel empty. Now that I'm alone the colors are faded. Everything looks far away. There's nothing left.

<p class="MsoNormal">9260708

<p class="MsoNormal">I am leaving now. I will become one with the collective, and I shall achieve all that I have dreamed of and longed for in my soul and still greater feats, for I shall have the strength of the Collective with me, and I shall fulfill my glorious visions such that there will be no I, there will be an eternal Us. The spirit of a million souls freed from the bodies the machine has consumed will flow into mine and will give me power beyond reckoning. I will feel perfect love and the warm comfort of belonging, and with my new magnificence I will have endless strength. My footfalls will shake the earth. my love will be infinite and I will satisfy all my lusts and my hungers. I will take of the world and give all that I am to the Collective, for it shall flow into me and I to it, so that I have no end and no beginning. I will never be alone.

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">Alright so before I get into this properly let me just say I’m harshest on stories that are good. This is good. I will be harsh.

<p class="MsoNormal">1) Mechanical issues – Dude you gotta learn what a proper noun is, and you need to tone down your use of them. They feel clichéd and over the top half the time, and they’re also pretty obtuse. At the end of my critique I’ll post Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writings and holy shit you need to print them out and pin them next to your monitor. But for this particular point I’ll just make it clear that you need to organically introduce your setting, characters, and world building in a way that makes sense. You can’t just go “Oh yeah The Factionalists and The Collective and The Nothing and The OP and The HZ and The Engineers” because no one will know what the hell you’re talking about. So for my first mechanical issues I’ll just say don’t make something a proper noun unless it’s clear to the audience what the hell it’s referring to. There’s only one Eiffel Tower but the words collective, nothing, factionalist, and engineers all mean a bajillion other things so you can’t just rely on a capital letter to let the audience know that you’re on about one specific instance of those things.

<p class="MsoNormal">For the next ring of mechanical errors are basic spelling errors and the odd missing word. Overall this isn’t a big deal, everyone makes mistakes and I don’t feel like this story was below par for that fact. Still, some of these were errors that MS word pulled up for me, so it should’ve done the same for you. In the future you need to use a spellcheck.

<p class="MsoNormal">2) Stylistic Issues – Right well this is your story’s strong point. Fantastic use of language, description, mood, atmosphere etc. I’m not going to go into laborious detail with regards to what you do right, but I will with regards to what you do wrong. What you do wrong is that your style simply isn’t clear. You do a good job of making the world feel oppressive and shitty and that’s great, but it goes too far and the basic sequence of events starts to become obscured. Similarly repetition and redundancies are a major problem. This ties into the following point though.

<p class="MsoNormal">3) Plot issues – so remember those entries I put pins into? Yeah well they’re all basically the same damned entry. In a diary/journal story every entry must have a distinct and unique purpose, and it must move the plot forward in a discrete, clear, and simple way. No one wants to read four entries that all serve the same narrative purpose. In your case each of the four entries I ‘pinned’ basically did the same job of conveying that the guy was having a tough time and was getting a bit depressed. This guy is depressed? One entry telling us that will do. No more are needed.

<p class="MsoNormal">Next up is that these redundancies just drag the whole damn thing down and rob this story of clarity and simplicity. Simple is always better. Strip out the unnecessary moving parts and keep it flowing. Ironically the best part of this story isn’t even explored that well – we never get to see the collective actually do anything, nor do we ever get any strong/clear descriptions of the environment. Everything is clouded with this desperate attempt to convey an oppressive atmosphere and so we never get clear, simple, descriptions of the station, its purpose, and the threat this guy faces. It’s all swollen desiccated eyes and ashen skin with the shadows of a thousand kaleidoscopic singularities and after a while I just wanna swat all that shit away and say, “So what’s actually happening then?” because none of it is clear.

<p class="MsoNormal">Okay so in conclusion – tone it down. Just reel it all in and get it under control. Think about each entry and the job it has, don’t let entries do the same job more than once. Don’t let atmosphere overtake basic narrative sense, keep the story logical and with a clear sequence of events. There is a distinction between ambiguity, and bad writing, and everyone likes to think they’re writing ‘ambiguously’ but 99% of the time they’re not. Introduce the moving parts of your story and for each one ask whether it’s necessary. Don’t be afraid to rely on tropes to save time (why call them Factionalists when Rebels does the exact same job and saves the audience time?). Also don’t go for the lame ass ‘psychological horror’ route. Everyone thinks they can pull it off and it makes them classy but most of the time they fail. People reading a monster story wanna see a monster – show us the monster. Don’t go overboard, but don’t resolve a story with some weird wobbly ending where the guy throws a tantrum and buggers off into a recycling machine. It’d be nice (after 4000 words) to actually see something happen.

<p class="MsoNormal">Finally – I liked this story. I’d like to see it back here with another draft (it could lose… like half its words though). It’s a fantastic premise and you do a lot of things right. I have been harsh because this has shit loads of potential and I’d love to see it realized.

<p class="MsoNormal">Oh and here are Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing. A basic summary reads as “don’t waste your readers’ fucking time because they won’t give you a second chance i.e. write economically” but here they are in full anyway.

<p class="MsoNormal">Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

<p class="MsoNormal">Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

<p class="MsoNormal">Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

<p class="MsoNormal">Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

<p class="MsoNormal">Start as close to the end as possible.

<p class="MsoNormal">Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

<p class="MsoNormal">Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

<p class="MsoNormal">Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.