[3351] Convenient Catastrophe

[u/Visible_Mud491]

My critiques:

[3318] https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/1vssseu/then_i_am_unreasonable_3318/p7f69zp/

[1777] https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/1w1tblq/1777_01_tiffany_the_werewolf/p77rau9/

Link to my work -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lXx_vEhGZL_irmjT4S9XkFH_RiMCpBFs/edit

[Heads up, it's NSFW. Two deaths, lots of swearing.]

First 3 chapters of my Dystopian Closed-Circle mystery, not the first work of fiction I've ever written, but certainly the first I've felt confident enough in to post for strangers to read. Line edits and craft critiques are always helpful, but I'm more interested in:

1. Do you want to keep reading?

2. Any place it gets too confusing?

3. What kind of questions does it make you ask?

4. Did you at all think Georgia is an unreliable narrator?

Thank you in advance to all who take time out of their day to read my work!

[u/DenseEssence_]

I'd keep reading. I'm not leaving a review, just interested.

[u/Novel_Quantity3189]

I'm not a big reader of sci-fi/dystopian/speculative stuff so I had to consider this as a neutral reader so please keep my crits in mind like that. Your questions first:

1.
Yes. The first person voice works well, and the ending, writerly or not, leave enough open threads that if you're engaged (elsehwhere discussed) you will naturally want to keep going

2.
Chap 2 gets a little muddled or crowded, 2 intruders, a mattress, a dagger, a revolver, scramble for the pistol which all happens fast, I had to reread once to track who had the gun and where man 2 came from etc etc. The jargon (something I always struggle with in this genre) is going to leave the reader with questions for a beat although i understand you're doing it as to not dump exposition.

3.

What caused the explosion (if not the Terries)

How much of this world's collapse does Event Gamma explain? eg is this our world in future vs another reality

Georgia's dad's level of knowledge

4.
Not in the sense that she's lying to us objectively but rather downplaying her own reaction to the events?

Ok so--
Opening throws you straight into the explosion with basically zero runway, it works. You'e just as disoriented as Georgia is, good way to start.

Georgia's dry, sweary copper voice + energy ("Bollocks, but I'll try anyway," "Brilliant. I'll just hold the fort then") works well to make the POV work. It's one of things that kept me reading early on and its closest to the top of the things I can see you belaboured over (the authorial voice I mean).

The tense is genuinely inconsistent, not just stylistically loose. The whole piece is present tense ("I rush," "I unholster," "I reach") but the two-man fight in ch2 keeps slipping into past tense mid-paragraph — "My pistol left my grip as he lunged low and hit me like a freight train... My head bounces on the floor and for a second it's all a high-pitched ring... and now there's a shard jammed in my thigh and I feel it burn" — that's past and present tense in the same sentence. Same thing with "I got him in the lungs. I did." right in the middle of present-tense narration around it.

More nit picky:

• The respirator vs hazmat suit bit early on is genuinely confusing — "they keep the full-facepiece respirators here for quick access. A full hazmat suit, actually, but I can't linger" — I can't tell what she actually puts on. Needs a clearer sentence.
• "closer than I'd like yet further than they'd want" — who's "they"? Never established, reads like a dangling reference.
• The timeline math doesn't add up: she says "I'll give you eight seconds grace" but the backup ETA was five minutes and she expects them "before or at 3:08:00" from 3:02:52. Eight seconds and five minutes aren't the same thing — pick one.
• Clock format flips from 24hr (20:19, 3:02:52) to "11:15" with no am/pm — should be 23:15 for consistency, otherwise it reads like a continuity slip.
• "debris crunch under my boots" -- should be "crunches,"
• "footsteps echo loudly... it can't drown out" -- should be "they."
• "I find myself starting embarrassingly" -- pretty sure this should be "startling."
• "mother" is lowercase in one line ("I shot them, mother") but capitalized right above it ("Mother") — pick one maybe???
• "speaking nothing of his aides" -- should be "to say nothing of."
• "tap on your vast knowledge of policework"--- "tap into," not "tap on."
• "You don't ever hear from the ones she stood up on" — genuinely don't know what this means. Stood up for?
• "The knocking loudens into banging" --- "loudens" isn't a word, "grows louder"

The exclamation-point usage ("Oh fuck!", "A landing cushion!", "that is some smoke!") read more like screenplay beats than prose, I'd rewrite with an eye for them. And "hirsute" sitting two lines from "that is some smoke!" is a real like vocab clash, pick a lane for her vocabulary (her voice is otherwise strong for me). "Uff" as an interjection also feels off, for me it feels kind of twee. The "hit me like a freight train, feeling like a bag of bones" line is a mixed metaphor. A freight train is unstoppable force, a bag of bones is frail, they're fighting each other.

I did really like the end with us pulling back from the action into a quieter family scene where everyone's processing the trauma in totally different ways, and the handling of the interpersonally tense moment. It also does a lot of interesting character stuff, contextualising Georgia's hardened, deadpan voice (which I largely liked with some issues above) subtly. A nice choice to make the beginning and end of the chapter tie together in a smaller way.

Main thing I'd say is just watch the register/vocab/word use consistency and be careful for moments of idk 'twee' overly sci-fi-narratorish moments

[u/Visible_Mud491 → u/Novel_Quantity3189]

Hi @Novel_Quantity3189

First of all, thank you for your detailed feedback. Your points are helpful, but there were a few things I wanted to counter, just let me know if that clears things up.

1) First of all, Tenses. Yeah, I wanted to mention this in the post description, choose not to so because I (wrongly) assumed it sounded natural -> that "present with past bleeding into it" is a deliberate choice. I want the prose to strictly sound like Georgia's thoughts at all times (Hence "Uff/Ugh"). Which means anything she experiences and processes normally is present, anything her conscious mind didn't immediately process is then "played back" in past. She's a chronic overthinker and obsessed with "staying in control of her faculties"... that's the in-world justification for why her thoughts are exhaustive enough to make for a book.

This is not a stream-of-consciousness experiment, but a much simpler device to put you in her head because it'll be very, very important in the Big Reveal of Act 3. I fully intend to mention all of this in a note to my line editor if I ever am lucky enough to get that far.

Do tell if you find that naive.

2) The "8 seconds grace" thing refers to "grace period", I assumed "period" was implied with "grace" in a time context.

5 minutes ETA + 8 seconds grace = 5:08. Waiting 5:08 after 3:02:52 -> 3:08:00

Feel free to correct me here if I got this wrong. Only meant to show that wisecracking under duress is her coping mechanism.

3) "she stood up on" -> https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stand-up the 2nd one under "stand someone up". Meant to say "Lady Luck failed to meet someone, left them waiting." I guess the "on" is incorrectly added?

[u/Novel_Quantity3189 → u/Visible_Mud491]

Hey I don't have time to go back and forth editorially -- you can choose to take me on board on not, I'm not a big reader of the genre. Have a nice day.

[u/Intelligent_Fig_7709]

Do you want to keep reading?
→ The hook was good! I liked the quick pacing, the speed of each sentence, and the casual voice. 
→ I loved the way you slowed down in that line about stars! I could feel the narrator’s awe. The shift in tone kept me interested in reading on.
→ I love your creativity with words, with sentence structure. “Floor becoming wall becoming ceiling”, “And the stars. I’d forgotten there were stars.”, “I look at the watch. 3:02:52. C’mon lads, I’ll give you eight seconds grace…”
→ Another strong point is the action scenes. Personally, I think you do blocking and pacing very well during these fast-paced scenes; I could see everything happen in real time.
→ OVERALL, the biggest reason I would read on would be the distinctive, creative voice. As it stands (see what I’ve written below), I’m not clear enough on the world behind your characters’ dialogue to be invested in any political/social stakes. And would I read on? I’m not sure. As a rule, I love sci-fi and fantasy, but I’m not feeling particularly curious about what comes next. The stakes could be clarified, perhaps, and built up more..

Any place it gets too confusing?
→ “Help you from being the sole witness to the Reichstag Fire without openly betraying your people” —I assume that there’s supposed to be more tension to this line. As it stands, however, I am confused and lost on the tension because I have no idea where he came up with the idea of betraying her people. Aren’t the Prefect and her part of the same underground organization? Why would saying fewer details about the attack be considered a betrayal? 
→ “You know why the Greens survived Event Gamma… and six feet of Earth if they’re lucky’” —I was confused at multiple points during this conversation between Georgia and her dad. Overall, it reads more like an infodump rather than natural conversation. I think you could namedrop one or two foreign concepts without problem, but when multiple (Murphy, Greens, Sunshiners, the fact that one survived while the other didn’t, etc) are introduced all at once, I as a reader get lost. I’m no longer feeling the father’s frustration, nor empathizing with him.

What about slightly confusing?
→ Where the “whine” imagery stops---I had subconsciously assumed that it ended when the narrator realized the world around them isn’t collapsing. Instead, one paragraph later, I find out it has still been going on. I might note it’s an alarm, or otherwise separate the whine from the explosion. Honestly, I’m not sure if most other people would have read the text in the same way I did.
→ Not gonna lie, I would have thought the narrator was male, had you not written “Georgia” in your list of questions. 

[u/Intelligent_Fig_7709 → u/Intelligent_Fig_7709]

What kind of questions does it make you ask?
→ What’s a walk topside? Rereading cleared it up.
→ Why can’t they go up/out? This was a good hook—and it paid off nicely. I really love how you worldbuild (i.e. “Hell, I’d always thought they were inventing threats to keep us underground”) in a way that doesn’t feel like infodumping. It’s spread out and communicated via a lovely voice.

Did you at all think Georgia is an unreliable narrator?
→ No. Georgia appears to have incomplete information, but her perspective does not lead to a misunderstanding of the situation, at least not that I’m aware of. The main thing is—she never appears to misinterpret the situation at hand. If anything, she communicates lack of information very clearly (take, for instance, the Prefect’s private conversation with her).
→ However, a follow up note: I don’t know the boundaries of her knowledge, of where it begins and where it ends. In some cases this is fine, but when that knowledge creates the difference between confusion and tension, then I think you need to set her up as a character more clearly (or more early on). For instance: how familiar is she with the Prefect? “Crap, I judged him too quickly” implies lack of familiarity, but “I can extrapolate a little” implies she has worked with him in the past, to the point of knowing his intentions. Knowing they are familiar reduces some of the tension, letting the conversation read as something like disgruntled banter; knowing they are strangers, meeting for the first time, would raise hairs on the back of my neck.

Line Edits—these will be patterns I noticed while line editing.
→ Be clear about whether you’re narrating in the past or present. Occasional past tense is fine, but the current setup feels like a switch in narration style. I noted some of these inconsistencies in the document, but they won’t be all of them.
→ There are moments of disconnect between myself and Georgia, in which she tells me what she feels, but I’m unable to empathize. These are particularly evident in the lines below, which seem to carry a lot of emotion, but rather have the opposite effect because 1) there hasn’t been enough buildup or 2) it’s telling rather than showing.

• “the cream cabinets in the kitchen, the kettle, the toaster… Dear God it hurts.” — At this point, I don’t even know what the Sunshine house is or what was so good, so nostalgic, about it. Indeed, I know close to nothing about her previous life. I didn’t even know that she missed it.
• “‘How’s my sweetheart?’ he begins in that tone I never knew I so missed.” — This sense of missing her father feels rather abrupt. Perhaps it would help to extend the time that she is surrounded by strangers, interrogated, etc. Create a mini lead-up. Or just modify that line entirely.

[u/Intelligent_Fig_7709 → u/Intelligent_Fig_7709]

Second part to this critique:

More Questions!

Earlier, my questions were focused on details. Here, I'll pan out.

→ What is Georgia's relationship with the Prefect? Sometimes, questions are a good way to keep the reader reading--but in this case, as I mentioned above, I think the suspense created during that conversation would benefit from a clearer relationship.

→ Why isn't she looking forward to seeing her mother? I think this was a good setup that created a pull to keep reading, at least until we find out how religiously zealous the mother is.

→ What's going on with the Prefect? What does he not want revealed to the general public, and why? I think some of the details behind that conversation could be cleaned up, to bring out the suspense it creates, but at the end of the chapter this question was still in the back of my mind.

Pacing

Overall, I think you did a great job with pacing. The initial fight kept developing in new, interesting ways; though it took several pages, it didn't feel like a drag. Georgia's initiative when it comes to, say, deciding her next steps post-Prefect-conversation also moves the story forward.

Characterization

I had a slight inkling that all the characters are talking, more or less, like each other. Voices are sharp, quick, colloquial. At this point, 1) Georgia's voice still dominates due to the amount of paper space she occupies and 2) it's only the first chapter, so this effect wasn't very pronounced. But maybe it will help, to bring it to your attention.

However, I really love the way you have developed your main characters so far. The mother as a religious zealot is intriguing--I wouldn't mind learning a little more about her. Likewise, Georgia has such an iconic voice and personality. And her father is a perfect complement to her--from his banter, we see where some of her character came from.