Honest Critiques
No, I mean it. REAL honest. Email your excerpts or full stories, up to 1000 words or so, to honestcrits [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk. Synopses would also be welcome. My backlog is so daunting now that I recommend not submitting anything you are not prepared to wait a couple of months for a response on.
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Thursday, September 15, 2005
Constant Never
Just a morsel. La Marqueza has sent me a link to her blog, saying "This is a short personal essay type of piece. I would like to expand it further. Insights would be greatly appreciated."
Click across there to read it now. Got that? Good. I'm not sure exactly what insights I can give for this - I'm not sure what she's thinking of doing with it - but I will say that the second paragraph is much better than the first. The odd rhymes in the first bit - 'been' and 'seen', 'place' and 'face' - are jarring in prose, unless you've established the sort of voice that can say things like that. There's also some very dodgy sentence construction : "Then there is the line going east, first across the Mississippi river washed up on a truly decadent city then on to another more subdued place with no less a fantasy than the one in Nevada." I can't quite tell what that means. And, indeed, the big problem with this paragraph is that I don't know what these lines are or what I'm being told about.
La M. gets more into her stride in the second paragraph, which has some good images - I like the cemetery "thrown down and forgotten by the side of the railway tracks". In the list, the artless longing for sensation, for the sausages on sticks and the feel of rough fabric, feels genuine. On the other hand the 'living statue' is peculiar.
"Lovers are lucky they have a lifetime but the anonymous bodies in the empty rooms across the landscapes of America's hotels are even luckier because they have the freedom to choose where they go, who they see, and where they lay their heads down for the next night, in the next city." I keep reading it and thinking there's a glimmer of poetry there; but when I try to get a good long look at it, it slips away. You could sprinkle some commas and things through there and make it grammatical, but would you lose the flavour? The charm of the person who says "Perhaps you could join me in each and every place. That I would like too"?
Click across there to read it now. Got that? Good. I'm not sure exactly what insights I can give for this - I'm not sure what she's thinking of doing with it - but I will say that the second paragraph is much better than the first. The odd rhymes in the first bit - 'been' and 'seen', 'place' and 'face' - are jarring in prose, unless you've established the sort of voice that can say things like that. There's also some very dodgy sentence construction : "Then there is the line going east, first across the Mississippi river washed up on a truly decadent city then on to another more subdued place with no less a fantasy than the one in Nevada." I can't quite tell what that means. And, indeed, the big problem with this paragraph is that I don't know what these lines are or what I'm being told about.
La M. gets more into her stride in the second paragraph, which has some good images - I like the cemetery "thrown down and forgotten by the side of the railway tracks". In the list, the artless longing for sensation, for the sausages on sticks and the feel of rough fabric, feels genuine. On the other hand the 'living statue' is peculiar.
"Lovers are lucky they have a lifetime but the anonymous bodies in the empty rooms across the landscapes of America's hotels are even luckier because they have the freedom to choose where they go, who they see, and where they lay their heads down for the next night, in the next city." I keep reading it and thinking there's a glimmer of poetry there; but when I try to get a good long look at it, it slips away. You could sprinkle some commas and things through there and make it grammatical, but would you lose the flavour? The charm of the person who says "Perhaps you could join me in each and every place. That I would like too"?
Torgo, 11:26 pm
1 Comments:
Knock, knock, hey Torgo...where'd ya' go. I know the cricket thing is over and the hurricanes are here, not there. Are you imitating Rumplestilskin! Ha..say that three times fast.
