New Assignment...

[Beswitchingly Positive]

The brutality of H Dean strikes...

If this is brutality, give me all you got. Please. And thank you.


This was not so good as your last offering. This is not to say it was bad; far from it. It just wasn't as good.

As with your previous story, you managed to create a mood. Often, your choice of words lent well to the story's sort of dreamy atmosphere. I do like how you create an atmosphere. Unfortunately, you tend towards run on sentences, elonging them where shorter, more distinctive sentences would fit.

The assignment was to describe a setting, Drangon's Muse wanted to feel like she was there, I am not sure i managed that, however a fellow bartender/old friend I worked with read it, though he knows the place he said he could have pictured it anyway....maybe it worked on that level.


I am not going to dwell on the majority of the technical gaffes - that's for Muse and I shant be the one to step on her toes...she might kick me. My critisism's will mostly be, as usual, stylistic in nature and only mildly touching on the technical.

I have little formal training, got hung up on Kerouac at a very young age which might explain my love of runnning on...I would like to be better at it, at the same time I would like my writing to be more effective and flow is important to me... the technical gaffes...I would love to iradicate them...thank you so much for muddling through my messy offering...your corretions and suggestions have been helpful,



Away we go...

It was currently her favorite song on the jukebox; never liked country music before she had to work with that album on the box...the clipty clop of the rythm pulsed gently from the green neon machine, the way Luke walked the guitar carried it as she sang along softly and washed glasses.

Carried the song or the jukebox? You tried to get too much into one sentence. Make this a couple of shorter sentences and you have a winner. The descriptions were quite good, while the sentence was convoluted and harsh to the flow.


convoluted! yikes. I am drawn to the task of describing music...find it difficult indeed.


Lost in a moment of music, her hands missing in the soapy water, backlit by the brighter lights shining on the big mirror and the shelf of bottles behind her, notes from the guitar sliding along with the words, her eyes half on the little dining room.

This was an incomplete thought. Lost in the moment of the music...what? Again, I enjoyed your descriptions, especially her hands "missing in the soapy water". Unfortunately, you have about a hundred things modifying a sentence that ends nowhere. A quick suggestion for things like this: find the conclusion of the sentence and then modify it.

I was madly in love with the idea that started here but burned out...I will rework it as I now realize what i was trying to say...


The waiter could take care of the few tables they had at three in the morning. She had recently attended to the scattering of customers at the bar; the snuggly couple at the end, close together on their seats with fresh golden pints; the boys just off work in their waiter's black and whites competeing for the two tourist girl's attention with amber shots of Jameson and black frothy pints of Guinness...she half heard the happy chatter of her customers. Everyone was content. Everyone but her. As she worked, her mind was elsewhere

You don't need the "As she worked". You set up the situation well. Chop that sentence down and you get a more lonely and far off tone.

Chop it and set it alone even perhaps. I didn't want her to seem lonely, just that she was longing for him...my perfect seduction is a scene where the seductee is aching to be seduced, has been made to wait and wonder.


Singing until she saw him, she looked up from the last glass at the beginning of the second chorus and caught him watching her in the hazy light. He was right there, sitting, watching her as she sang. She caught her self, almost gasping in delight as she looked up from the sink; her voice siezed midword. She sightlessly dipped the pint glass for a final rinse and was washed over with warmth for him as her eyes settled the face she most wanted to see, she drew her hand from the water.

As you write, you tend to lengthen out sentences needlessly. As you see, from my naration to you, it's a bit distracting. As you know, overuse of pronouns can get on the nerves of the reader as they read. Okay, that was rotten. Funny, though.

Fine advice and funny too. I have been murdering my bad habits over the last few years, you would have hated my younger stuff. Maybe.


Shorter sentences in this case would have better delivered the sense of excitment she was feeling. Also, the order of what you present in this paragraph needs an adjustment. Judging by your other story, I think you can make this work so much better, and I would enjoy seeing how you could re-work it.

I struggled with this one more than the last exercise. I was pushing myself for details...you were right about the ending of my fender bender scene, I didn't believe him either...wanted it to be done.

Okay, I am not going to deconstruct everything. I don't want to give you the wrong impression. For all my critisism you might think that this was the worst tale I had ever read. It isn't. It's not as well done as your other story, though.

I appreciate the blasting and the boosting, I have been going through some wierd personal stuff (directly concerning my current seductor) and I was a little irritated honestly at the timing of this subject matter. It would be a much better story if I felt more....sane about my own decisions.



Now for some random things...

Along with pronoun overuse, you tend towards the overuse of conjunctions. Get rid of them, rearrange the sentences and use commas instead. Okay, not all the time. You can't write a story with no conjunctions - just don't use them so much.

There were flowers all over the room and the radiant smell of soft petals hit her nose and erased all memory of the smoky bar, her daily existance. - The radiant smell of soft petals hit her nose. Flowers were strewn about the room, erasing the smells of her daily existance at the smelly bar.

Not perfect, I know, but I wanted to kind of give you an idea of what I meant.

I already touched on the "as" thing and you know about the pronoun thing. I think I'm done.

I have a sexually ambiguous co worker who wishes not to be referred to with gender specific pronouns...I caught them (as I affectionaly call her them, there seem to be two of her) in the dish pit saying "he she he she he she I JUST CAN"T WIN" We get along fine, I have addressed the difficulty of omitting pronouns, your sugggestions here have helped me with this even more.




Wrong! I am a long winded SOB, so you have to put up with one more thing...


I think you are sweet.


Remember to try to edit your writing according to mood, not just technical aspects. Try never to overuse any particular word or structure in any given paragraph. Too many commas, conjunctions, pronouns, repeated words or lengthy sentences can really kill a story.

You didn't kill your story...it just wasn't as good as I think you can manage.

Now I am done. Hah!

Thank you! I will see what I can do to fix it as I started off hating it and ended up kind of liking it too. Poor mistreated little story.

Thank you for giving me more direction than I seem to be capable of alone.

Julia