Exhibit A: Week Three: Shenanigans

[aravfiel]

“You don’t belong here.” “Stop acting like someone you’re not!” “You must have done something to her!” “This is all your fault”Working on two years here, and I STILL get this shit

Comments

[myrna_bird]

Interesting kind of thinking out-loud by this person who cannot possibly fill the shoes of the one who is now gone. There is a lot of the human condition in her spouting off and I actually identified with her sense of being unappreciated and needing to step back and take care of herself.:)

[aravfiel]

Hah, thank you! I think I could have done a bit better filling in the holes, but I'm glad that I didn't COMPLETELY fail at passing this off as a thought stream/fragment of the story. Like I said below, IF I continue on this vein her character would unfold in time-I didn't want more than a fragment of her personality unveiled to start off with. I am, however, thrilled at the parts you picked up out of this, as they were rather woven in there and I wasn't sure how many people would-at least, right off the bat. Which is to say, I didn't know if I wove them under the surface TOO much. ^_^

[halfshellvenus]

I found a lot of this confusing, to be honest, maybe because most of it remains abstract throughout the narrative. I don't have a good sense of what the narrator IS, more of what he/she is not in comparision to the person being replaced. :(

However, I loved both this idea, You try having a bundle of preschool and kindergarten age kids running around aging at different rates, see how calm you are! (that ALONE would make for an interesting story!), and also the image of wild monkeys in a Victorian tea room. Worse than the bull in the china shop, because monkeys have hands and can get up on things, and what a complete nightmare that would be!

[aravfiel]

Hrm. Well, I think the problem is that I'm just bad at original fiction, most days. (Meaning fiction that isn't simply fan-fic.) I was writing this as half stand-alone, half part of a series of short stories that would shape characters and their tales over time. I was hoping that this would be taken as nothing more or less than a rant from the narrator, whose story STARTS with the content of this rant but whose nature and personality would unfold over time.I tend to prefer to shape people over a small series of short pieces, which I probably should have mentioned but failed to brain at the time. I was hoping the way I wrote it implied that, as well as giving it the appropriate formatting to stand by itself until elaborated on (if I decided to do so

[halfshellvenus]

The only way to get better at OF is to write it, so it's all a process

[aravfiel]

Nonono, you're not being a pest. This is actually exactly the kind of critique I was hoping for, since I KNOW my writing-fiction or not-has many flaws that I can't easily identify (if I can identify them at all) on my own. I appreciate you taking the time to comment with me about it, really. It is quite helpful: on top of letting me fix problems, it gives me a better ability to see my writing from the outside, because I can more easily define and describe the writing style itself, not just the content. :) And no-I won't be giving up on writing anytime soon. I have a (very very very long and quite probably very cheesy) fanfic that I'm working on just for my own self, and while I probably won't show it to the rest of the world (like most of the things I write, really), I like continually perfecting what I write for myself. The greatest critic of a work is the artist, after all.

Again, thank you. :)

~S~

[jem0000000]

It's difficult for anyone to accept someone as a person when they're comparing them to a predecessor; for that matter, it's difficult to accept yourself as a person in the middle of that.

What happened?

(This feels like something where I ought to already know the setting, because you're hinting at things but not giving us any concrete information or names. I'm picking up things here and there, but nothing solid enough to be sure that's what you're going for.)

[aravfiel]

*snort* Tell me about it

[jem0000000]

No worries; you don't have to explain at all. I just wanted to let you know that my reaction was, primarily, "What happened?" because sometimes reactions are a thing that's useful to me when I write.

Good luck! :)

[aravfiel]

Being clearer about who was speaking was a flaw I didn't manage to correct, definitely. The part about why she replaced her predecessor, beyond the simple explanation given, wouldn't have been given in this piece anyway-if I had elaborated on anything, it would have been written in later connecting pieces-mostly because why she's here has nothing to o with what she's complaining about-the unacceptable, if understandable, attitudes of those around her were the problem. :)

Thank you for the compliments. :) It's certainly not my best piece (hence my status in the poll right now), but it's nice to hear I'm not alone in thinking it's not a complete failure. ;)