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

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.