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cjet79  3mo ago (text post)   2840 thread views

Maker's Monday

Trying out a new weekly thread idea.

This would be a thread for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers. We can coordinate weekly standup type meetings if their is interest.

@ArjinFerman, @Turniper, and myself all had some initial interest.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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If you want, make a copy and DM me an anonymized/open commenter link and I'll suggest edits on the entire story.

Your writing is quite good, there are disruptions in flow from you doubling and sometimes tripling up on adjectives. Most instances you could omit one or all, two examples:

In the station, an ever-present soundscape practically smothers us, heavy and ominous and oppressive

Soundscape implies atmosphere and ubiquity, I think there's probably a better word choice. Heavy/Ominous/Oppressive aren't exact synonyms but here they're redundant because of "smothers."

"The ocean smothers us with sound" conveys it in fewer words.

I hear Whitlock faintly stirring* in the bunk underneath me. The bed creaks as he slowly, gingerly* sits up and begins to vomit into a bucket, choking and heaving and gasping* as the contents of his stomach unceremoniously escape his body. Once* the retching is over, there’s laboured breathing and a soft, low thud;* the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole.

"Stirring" implies a quietness, you could go with "I hear Whitlock's weak stirs."

"Slowly, gingerly" gingerly implies slowness.

"Choking and heaving and gasping" like the above, your omission of commas is meant to emphasize the unpleasantness but just "choking" captures it, and we already know he's having a bad time from the context, before and after.

"Once" is a word for temporal specificity, "when" is a word for temporal generality. When also reads better, "When the retching is finished there's laboured breathing"

"soft, low" redundant

I might omit to "there's laboured breathing and the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole"

Last notes: the rules for italicizing apply to titles of works, words not in English (though this would be often, not strictly always), and scientific terms. In prose you can style how you want so you can use italics for names like "Proteus" and "Mazu" but there are times it hurts the flow, especially back-to-back with "Caelus, Qianliyan."

Spirulina is proper when referring to the organism, for a food product it's just "spirulina cakes."

Thanks for reading, and for the feedback. I've changed the document to a commentable state now if you would like to leave some suggestions.

Reading through it again, I think you and @Amadan are probably correct about the excess of adjectives, especially in the introductory sections of the current draft. Not sure why I didn't notice this earlier myself, I suppose it's surprisingly easy to get lost in obsessing about large-scale sentence construction and excluding other considerations like these. I will be taking these critiques on board, and have made an attempt to cut some of the filler adjectives out (though I've left the google doc untouched for now so I can get more feedback on the submitted draft).

I've finished with suggested edits in the doc. It kept signing me out, that may be why it looks like several people were making suggestions.

I've done a lot of anon editing in /lit/ /wg/ threads, most of what I've read there is the kind of bad writing that editing can't fix. Yours is good, and you can see that in my edits being almost all words and parts of sentences you could omit. Using a few too many words is an easy fix. I liked it, I'll be reading more as long you keep us updated.

I meant to put these in my previous comment -- "That" can often be omitted, and there are some rules on writing numbers. The article says and I'll summarize, it's just narrative consistency, always writing them as numerals or always writing them as words. That is narrative, so in narration you'd write them all as numerals, and as dialogue you'd write them as the full words (though there are specific exceptions to this, the one I can name is street addresses, which are always written as eg "123 Main").

This is great, thanks, very comprehensive. I've looked through all of your comments and have taken virtually all of the proposed amendments on board, and do feel it improves the flow of the writing.

I'm also glad you're enjoying the story. I was worried people would tire of constant updates in the project thread, but it's encouraging to see that at least somebody would be willing to follow it. Depending on whether I meet my targets an update may or may not be forthcoming next Monday, but I will try to see this through to the end and post in the Maker's Monday thread in semi-regular intervals.

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