Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-9041013-20180420220610/@comment-9041013-20180425170353

Kolpik wrote: I read this a few days ago, but I had hoped someone else would give it a review before I tackled it. I like the overall story, but it needs editing badly. Tense is off in places, missing words, extra words, awkward sentence structure, etc. Nothing you can't fix easily enough. If you'd like I could point out some of those issues for you.

I think the beginning might flow better if you put the second paragraph first. Also, the 'never getting married' part doesn't seem necessary. I guess you could call it character building, but it offers nothing to the story that I can see.

The murder and suicide(?) that he witnessed as a kid scared him from the village. It gave me plenty to ponder. That's a good thing. The actual beating - The callous and vicious villagers - His lack of action - What other fucked up scenes from his childhood are still hiding in his head?

I found Dasha's scene to be quite chilling, but that kind of thing plays into my fear of crowds/mob mentality, so it may affect me more than others. I do feel it's repetitive, though. I think just one read of the verses can be just as dramatic. This is just copy/paste, but here is an imperfect example of how to do away with the repeated verses:

My sister then began chanting, The crowd repeated after her, she kept repeating the lines over and over as the fat man was being tied to the tree. A piece of rope was fastened around his neck, and then the rope was tied to the horse.

Dasha stopped chanting and then signaled her horse to start walking, pulling the rope tighter and tighter, she began chanting again, "O' Gods, please welcome my gift,- and so on.

I like the idea of a god just dropping by the village to see how the peasants get along, and having a little fun as well. I wonder (this is rhetorical); is Simeon's planting of the willow tree foreshadowing of a blooming devotion to Veles? Plenty of ideas to ponder in this story.

Ok so, it needs work, but you're certainly up for that. If you want to ask me about any specific parts I didn't cover much or at all, then please do. I'm sorry it took me so long to get to this. You always check out my stuff, so I'm happy to do the same for you. :)

Thanks for that. Sometimes I feel like I write like a person with retardation (ei, below average IQ). I did work over the technical aspect of this story, thanks to you, mostly. I mean, I did edit it like a gazilion times in the first couple of days after I'd posted it here, thinking here and there things aren't fine. Seems like I needed to go thoroughly through the whole thing again. (there's a mouthful for you right there).

As for the plot.

Boy, oh boy.

It's a whole story in it's own. See, Veronica is a homage to mostly one of my friends and also to an ex of mine. Both are "Veronica", the friend used to tease the girlfriend about how she's "my real girlfriend" when we were dating. On top of that, she herself comes from a fucked up background like that, more her parents than her, but them being in this weird cult like sect did affect her to a degree.

The whole opening paragraph, that's based on something that happened in my family, this "Uncle Sasha" was a real life person, and what had been explained in the story is pretty much what happened to him. We just don't really know if it was someone trying to get to his secret hobbie spots or if it was something else.

Dasha is based of a real person too.

As for the whole culty stuff, these things exist, minus the murderous mentality and hillbilly antics. All these weird things exist in Russia. Some dude did or still does, act as if he is the second coming of Christ and runs a semi-brainwashed community of followers. They're mostly a bunch of religious hicks but who knows what else goes on there. Rodnovery are a real movement of neopaganistic slavic people who follow some odd as hell ideas like there's something wrong with Jews, and heathenry being suitable for slavs as an ansecstral faith (eventhough, we aren't vikings, so no.) Hence I called them out over that stuff in the story, kind of.

And, as for the chanting, I kind of took it out of the Hannibal Rising movie, where Hannibal kills one of the nazis who canniblizied his sister, using a rope and a horse. He made the guy sing some song in french, so I had the fat man sing a prayer. His sacrificial hymn. I repeated it (and intend to keep it so) because I had no idea how else to press this point really, really, really hard.

Yeah, Veles was apparently a big deal to ancient slavs as he is part of the two bigger merger deities that we know of, has a bunch of places named after him, including words like "hair" in russian. He plays a huge role in their central myth as well, representing the chaos to Perun's order.

Veles did not randomly pop up to see whats up with the people, he came to collect the sacrifices, the ones from the beginning of the festival, and being who he is, figured out what the villagers were up to, but decided to stick around to see if he was right or wrong about them, and when he was wrong, he was unsurprised and left.

As for the rest, I'll leave you guessing.

Thanks again :)))