September 2020 Madness Round

[morbane]

Madness will happen on this post and in its comments. Thanks for playing!

Getting concrit
Ask for concrit by replying to this post (until the end of September 7). Anyone's welcome, whether or not you just took part in the August round. If you did sign up, you're welcome to ask for concrit on the same or different pieces, or ask for responses to more specific or different questions or the same ones. Concrit is not guaranteed.

Please include:

• How you want to receive feedback

ie, by reply to your own comment, by posting a review where the work is published (AO3, ff.net, LJ...), or by another means. (Note: comments are not screened on this post, so if you post a contact detail, anyone can see it.)

• Any specific questions you want concrit-givers to focus on, and what level of bluntness you prefer, if relevant

• Which works you want feedback on, and if any of your works are "safe" or should be skipped over

• What fandoms and content, roughly, your works contain - especially if asking for feedback on just a few pieces.

You can comment asking for concrit until the end of September 7 in your time zone.

It's okay to be more specific about the kind of concrit you want in Madness than in a normal round.

If you are willing to provide feedback on the feedback you get - "Yes, this was what I was looking for / I was surprised you focused on this aspect / Actually, that wasn't quite what I was asking / etc" - consider saying so. Please be constructive in these replies as well.

Sign-ups are closed now. Responses only please!

If you don't want any more concrit, reply to your own comment to say so.


Giving concrit
You don't need to wait until September 8 to reply - go ahead as soon as you see an author or work you'd like to give feedback to.

Please respect authors' safe works, and pay attention to their specific questions, the level of bluntness they prefer, and where they want you to post the feedback. If you want a starting point, see a rough guide to points to consider in concrit.

If you'd like to pay it forward and don't have anything to say about the stories linked below, see the rest of the open-for-concrit tag.

Comments

Concrit for Morbane

[morbane]

For now, I'd like to exclude the following as safe works: Daydreams, Uncertainties left to know, 4 Perfectly Innocent Explanations for Zalgon 26 McGee, The Tempest In My Mind.

I'd love thoughts on any of my other works at AO3 (morbane). It's mostly small fandoms. For most song works, reading the lyrics will acquaint you with the entire canon. I have lots of gen and m/f, and some m/m, f/f, and other things.

Please either give me feedback by replying here, or, if you'd rather post on AO3, please also drop a comment here to say which story you've commented on.

Any level of gentleness/bluntness is fine.

I don't have many specific questions. A lot of works were finished towards the ends of exchanges, and some of my endings are therefore rushed; if you think an ending is rushed, I'd be interested to hear what you might have expected to happen instead or what was missing. How to improve smut is always welcome. I'd really just like your impressions. If you started a story and back-clicked at a certain point, that's interesting to me too, even if all you have to say is "this is the point at which X became too much," or "this is the point at which I thought the story wasn't going in a way that interested me".

I'm happy to discuss your feedback with you, if that's something you're looking for! Otherwise, thanks in advance.

I'm also happy to answer a question about content before you begin reading a story.

Re: Concrit for Morbane - Provenance

[lalamorn]

I'm really glad to have looked through your works for something to concrit because "Provenance" was an absolute delight and I'm glad I got to read it!

I really enjoyed it, so a lot of this crit is going to be fairly minor and a matter of taste.

I liked the Pratchett-y asides ("His inflection failed to rise, lacking the impetus, much in the way a flatbread (once an abomination unto Nuggan, and now very popular, especially with a kind of pumpkin paste, especially in the north) lacked the impetus to turn into a loaf." is an excellent opening). I also liked how you showed the relationship between Polly and Jackrum, that Polly is still learning from her old sergeant, that the learning is also an excuse, that he makes her pay full price for drinks -- it all feels very true to them. The character voices as a whole were great! It was lovely to get to spend some time with Polly and Jackrum again.

I sometimes had trouble tracking exactly what the meaning was -- part of that was just that they're having a circuitous conversation, and trying not to speak openly, and was cleared up on a second read through. Some of it wasn't -- I'm still not entirely sure what Polly had spent longer than she'd expected to, considering her aim, means, exactly, following Leverage, Polly had discovered, was very much about where the person wielding it stood. And secrets were shots that could only be fired once. I like the first part of the thought -- it follows well from the thoughts about plausibility and context. Can't blackmail anyone if people will believe them and not you! But, spent longer what? Building plausibility? I just needed a little more context there.

LOVE the concept of Borogravian national literature. It sounds like an Abomination Unto Nuggan and illustrates really quickly how far Borogravia has come in the intervening years since the end of the book.

Getting into the plot of it, I had trouble tracking exactly what was under discussion. My understanding is: there's discussion of Jackrum being biographied/hagiographied (and WHAT a threat to level at him!). Polly thinks this issue should be confused, not only because of the big socks secret, but because Jackrum has a hidden soft side, and wouldn't want that to come out. Polly offers up a few options for successor Jackrums. Jackrum agrees, with stipulations.

My confusion was about exactly how they were planning to do it/what the purpose was. To keep the truth obscured is the main one, I picked up on that, but adding more Jackrums to the mix wouldn't stop the stories of Jackrum rescuing puppies and kittens -- are they hoping to add directly contradictory stories, putting Jackrum in multiple places at the same time? Are they trying to run this plan backwards through time, with people claiming to have always been Jackrum, or just having so many Jackrums running around that it's impossible to figure out which did which things? All of the above?

And I would have liked a bit more detail on She'd met a hopeful writer on the road just six days ago, and shared a carriage. After making non-committal noises in response to the story of his life and ambitions, she'd changed her plans and parted ways with him at Holz. The time she wasted there had been precious to her, but not as valuable as ensuring that she arrived in the man's wake, her point made for her by his unwelcome - and curtailed - visit. It's not necessary, but to me, having more of the conflict between Jackrum's need to keep secrets and a journalist's need to ferret them out would have made his easy capitulation feel more... earned? I guess?

I don't want to tell you to over-explain things, but those are the bits that I needed to read a couple times to feel like I understood. Since you mentioned endings -- I really liked the final line, I feel like it pulls the theme to the forefront! But having the last 8 lines be short, single sentences made it feel a little jerky? Maybe tagging something about the conversation shifting onto Polly relaxed and signalled for a fourth round of drinks, would have made it feel less abrupt?

I would love it if you could let me know if this was helpful -- concrit is something I'm not confident in!

Re: Concrit for Morbane - Provenance

[morbane]

Thanks very much! Thumbs up, good concrit. ♥

Your initial comments are very kind and it's nice to know what parts of the characterisation stood out as ringing true.

I had a brief oh no laughing reaction when I saw what story you'd picked because I'd wavered on putting this one on the safe list, because of how I struggled with it when I wrote it. And it is useful to hear your thoughts, so I'm glad I didn't, but I mention this because you're very accurate - I was struggling with the meaning when I wrote it, too. I think I was sometimes circuitous as a way of getting around that. "If I just gesture enough at the sense I'm going for I'm sure it'll work out!" (I wrote it for Chocolate Box, and learned the hard way that I overthink low-minimum exchanges, and initially tried to psych myself up to write a much rarer canon for my recipient… Etc.)

Polly had spent longer than she'd expected to, considering her aim - ahhh. It didn't occur to me how that could be (legitimately!) read as "If you, the reader, think about her goal, which you should be able to figure out…" when what I mean was "She took longer to consider her aim [still going with the arrows and shots metaphor] than she had meant to." Basically, I meant that she took a while to consider what to do with the secrets, but I got indulgent about the metaphor and surrounded the idea with so many fancy phrases that it invites the reader to look for more meaning than is there.

Getting into the plot of it, I had trouble tracking exactly what was under discussion. My understanding is:

Getting meta here, since you asked for feedback on concrit: I think this is an excellent structure. State an obstacle to your comprehension or a point you stumbled on, then recap what you think is going on at that point in the prose. The parts you get right will feel like a compliment or reassurance to the author and say "I'm paying close attention"; the parts you get wrong make it super clear what assumptions you're operating from.

I think my feeling was that the existence of stories of Jackrum rescuing puppies and kittens would feel less unpleasant and bowdlerizing to Jackrum, less like people re-writing him as they wanted him, if they were clearly part of a plurality in which everything and nothing was true, and if they existed because he'd consciously and intentionally handed over his legacy. But yeah, that's not really clear. And yes, I was trying to gesture at the successor-Jackrums developing retcons. (At this point, I was probably also hampered by being in love with the inspirational idea, Cynthia Voigt's Jackaroo - which as I vaguely remember it is a slightly grim Robin Hood story in which our protagonist stumbles on the realization that the local hero vigilante is a succession of people, and takes up the mantle.)

And yes! the writer part IS very compressed, and the Jackrum capitulation IS very brief. I was feeling deeply nervous about Pratchett narration, and handling the ideas almost like a hot potato. "If I put too many words around this I'm going to ruin it! Maybe my audience can do the work if I don't obviously stuff it up!" I feel a bit "fair cop, you caught me" here. :D I agree about the last few lines feeling jerky, too.

It's oddly validating for you to pick up on so many things I thought were rough. (Though I hope I haven't wasted your time.) It says to me that my own instincts about weak points told me true… and also that I didn't get away with them quite as much as I hoped, and should especially pause, and try not to take shortcuts, when I'm not sure exactly what I mean and am tempted to embroider words around it instead of being clear.

Thank you very much again.