Crit musings

[tanaise]

One of the pieces for tomorrow felt flat. It's wrong, but I can't explain why, or what would make it feel less flat for me. Which is frustrating, because it's the second piece by this author which has felt flat. I don't know if it's just a first draft flaw, which are quite common around here (I have this tendency to use one really truly wrong word once in the story: "coolest" in a very formal medieval/regencies story, 'crash' (in the stay for the the night sense) in a far future planet colonization piece.)

Comments

[astrophysicat.livejournal.com]

I think 'crash' would be hilarious lingo to have stuck around til that time. It would be even more ironic then, since many colonization ships could have just crashed and then had to live on that, less than ideal, planet.

Not quite so cool if it's unintentional, which goes back to the poetry/prose question... Some authors I do read because of the beauty of their prose (Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler), or the snippets of insight along the way, that add spice to the read (Michael Marshall Smith, Kurt Vonnegut). But these are more generally found in novels, where you really need those multiple layers of entertainment, rather than in short stories.