Concrit for pendrecarc

[pendrecarc]

I want to receive feedback by: DW comment

Here are the works I want feedback on (optional: and my safe works are...):

Complete works posted on AO3 after mid-2014. Filtered link here. For AO3 works, I'd prefer to get concrit here. Safe stories to exclude: Six Seeds; Red Sky at Morning; The Fine Print

If you've got loads of time and want to read a novel-length WIP, I'm working on a Regency f/f romance featuring identity porn, crossdressing, and marriage of convenience here: linneacarls. Feedback can go straight in the comments there.

My works' fandoms and content notes are:

The Queen's Thief; Jane Austen; Magnus Archives; Original Works; Rivers of London; a variety of smaller fandoms. Stories on AO3 are generally tagged or have notes for anything canon-atypical. The original WIP contains references to two instances of sexual violence, both of which occur before the story, neither of which was committed against the POV character.

I have these questions for readers:

I love writing pastiche and changing up my style based on the fandom and type of story. Would appreciate notes on how the chosen voice, POV, and style does or doesn't work. For example, in Rivers of London, I've written three stories with three different POVs, and I tried to make them all very specific to the chosen character. I'd love to hear ways in which that served, or failed to serve, any individual story.

I'd also love comments on pacing, characterization, and clarity of plot. For exchange stories, I'm often trying to convey a sense of larger events/context in a limited number of words and would like to know if that is or isn't successful. For the novel-length WIP, a sense of when it gets bogged down or repetitive, or when something needs more time. I love wordsmithing, so detailed feedback on phrasing, sentence and paragraph structure, rhythm, etc. is welcome. (It's possibly less useful for the novel-length WIP, which is completely unedited, but I'm open to it.)

The style of feedback I prefer to receive is: Anything from gentle to extremely critical feedback is fine!

Comments to this post will be: Unscreened

Comments

Routine Maintenance

[galadriel1010]

Hi! I'm reviewing this for Concrit-X.

First up, when I got my assignment I skimmed your work and glommed onto this one immediately. I read it straight up and have been thinking about it regularly ever since. It's so damn good, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The concept is brilliant. I'm always fascinated by the allusions to the Folly's security and what it guards, and you did a brilliant piece of worldbuilding to expand on those hints. It's very realistic to the universe, as well, being both dark and weird at the same time, but delivered in that charming style that makes you read on and then go back and think "Hang on a second, did he just say blood?"

Dismantling them would trigger an alert and activate the inner series of wards, which Nightingale had designed himself during that rather dull period from 1968-1973 when there had been very little to do but contemplate the inevitability of his own death and what that would mean for the future of English magic. Again, this is so on voice. Aaronovitch uses sentences like this and you've used it to great effect. It starts out so benignly, and then halfway through I spat my tea out laughing and then it got sad. Delightful.

Nightingale was no David Mellenby, and he was no Peter Grant. I love that you brought Mellenby in. He's one of my favourite unseen characters of the books, and the constant comparisons between Peter and him, and Peter's having to live up to so many ghosts, is wonderful. That you've had Nightingale call him out specifically here but also put Peter on the same footing as him already is a really lovely touch.

The conversation between Molly and Nightingale is really nicely done. The way they dance around the subject of Lesley and she manages to say so much without words really works for them. That moment when she sets the toast down "with rather more force than necessary" conveys the whole tangled mess, doesn’t it?

the woman spooning raspberry jam into a cup of otherwise perfectly good tea I winced. I know people swear by it, but I remain sceptical, so I'm on Nightingale's side with this one. And I laughed.

Varvara is a delight. I never warmed to her in the books, perhaps I will on reread, but if I do it will probably be because of this story. I genuinely like your portrayal of her as a person. She's just the right level of cheerful and sarcastic and I want to go out for drinks with her.

it didn’t mean he wanted to waste any of his borrowed time locked away from the world. Not any more of it than he already had. That's an interesting admission. I wonder how much of the 90s Nightingale was aware of?

I love how you've brought the other characters in. Guleed is a fun balance against the weirdness of the Folly, and the way she takes everything in her stride puts it all into perspective. Her brief conversation with Molly about cake is such a wonderfully normal moment considering who she's talking to and where she is.

The SPECT scan conversation is brilliant. Again, draws the contrast between Varvara and Nightingale, one who went out and enjoyed her life and one who stayed locked away in the past. I love Varvara's collection of records and her clothes, and Molly claiming them away, that was such a perfectly Rivers of London moment. The phrasing of the wrinkles were not long for this world is spot on.

“I suppose we’ll have to go back to vodka-fueled interrogations to get any useful intelligence from you.”

“I look forward to it.” Stop flirting, you two. Or don't.

Really liked the personal effects box. It was a lovely way to look at Varvara's life without requiring exposition or the aforementioned vodka, and showed a more vulnerable side of her. Nightingale being more gentle than usual with he box said a lot about him too.

Is this about the sheep? I love their whole conversation, but that set me off. What a way to open a conversation. Abdul and Nightingale have a wonderfully relaxed relationship here, I love it. And then you did it to me again when Peter rang, but thankfully I'd finished my tea by that point.

The insight into what was going on at the Folly at the time is really interesting. I really like the route you took with it, Nightingale's immediate concern for Peter and his sending Bev with him, and his instinct to go haring off after him even though he knows he can't.

He told himself the brownish splotches were at least as likely to be beef gravy as they were to be human blood. Siri, sum up the Folly for me in one sentence. I love that it's on graph paper, and the sentimentality of refusing to transcribe them so he has an excuse to keep hold of it. I could have cried at that. I am a Nightingale/Mellenby shipper, and my poor little shipper heart went out at that moment.
Your descriptions of the Folly during and then immediately after the wars are excellent. Deft and delicate, and achingly sad in their way.

And now we hit the really, really juicy worldbuilding. It's so good? Voice is absolutely spot on, it could have come from one of Aaronovitch's short stories and I'm pretty sure I'll be misremembering it as canon in years to come. I love how utterly present David is, even when he's decades gone. That description of his signare as warm and welcoming made my heart ache.

That aside about the gap at the twelfth order and Nightingale wishing he could remember it to tell Peter? Absolute magic. We were so robbed of their interactions. They'd get on so well. And Nightingale has both of them in his head telling him to stop (and of course he doesn't listen).

For an instant of utter clarity, he saw the wards opening like a chasm beneath his feet, the roiling horror of the death that had paid for them exposed like a raw nerve. And then the spells did not so much collapse as implode. Stunning. Voice absolutely spot on, sense of horror and weird is perfect. Just *Chef's kiss* I had a moment of genuine fear when he couldn't light the werelight, like the first time I read River of London and Peter's werelight got eaten.

I want to hug Nightingale. I don't think he'd appreciate it, but I want to do it.
Varvara to the rescue! Sort of. I love their banter backwards and forwards, the things he answers and the ones he doesn't, the way he just impellos her into the wall rather than arguing about it and she knows better than to try anything big in that space. And she's straight in there looking after him, for reasons that must have been utterly bewildering to him even if he weren't half out of it with blood loss and battering his brain against the wards. The drawing in the corner is so lovely I'm going to cry again. Is it weird that I miss a character we never met? I am inordinately fond of David.
I both do and don't want to know what the sacrifices are. I think you've made it quite clear, but if I don't acknowledge that I won't cry again.

That conversation about their immortality leading to the revelation about the blood is brilliant. I wondered where you were going with it (not that I wasn't enjoying the journey, I very much was) and then that came out of nowhere. So simple, so obvious, so brilliant when the penny finally drops. And of course Nightingale goes into self-recrimination whilst Varvara uses her brain, but we'll forgive him since he's so battered already.

Oh my shippy heart. Poor Nightingale. Poor David. Damnit Aaronivitch.
“Oh, do consider Peter, if you find that helpful,” she said with unnecessary enthusiasm. I cackled. Probably shouldn't, but I did.

Nightingale trying not to plead. Varya enjoying the command. Very nice indeed. Sex scenes are not my usual wheelhouse, but I really enjoyed the mix of flirty, sexy and sarcastic

Their conversation in the smoking room after, again with so much left unsaid, wraps things up so nicely. I particularly liked the use of My Generation to tie it all off. It's the perfect album for it.

General notes:
As I've mentioned, I really loved your voice for this story. It felt very accurate to the canon and also to Nightingale. Not as many architectural wanderings as we get with Peter, more reminiscences and historical reflections, which felt spot on.
You placed it really well within the context of the series and drew on the wider events well, although I was confused at times by the timeline you had for David Mellenby. This might be because of things from books released since, though, I realise it's a while since you wrote this and creators have an annoying habit of Jossing us. You expanded on hints we've been dropped beautifully.

So in short, I just really loved this story.

Re: Routine Maintenance

[pendrecarc]

Okay, confession, this is one of my personal favorites--it was so much fun to write, and sometimes I indulge myself by rereading it just for kicks! (And then adjust my Spotify playlist accordingly, because the music is A Mood.) You've picked out so many of the things I still love about it. If I've managed to warm you up toward Varvara, I'm more pleased than I can say!

Thank you for this lovely, detailed response on so many levels! It means a lot to me.

Sex scenes are not my usual wheelhouse TBH they aren't mine, either, but when I figured out I could use one as actual plot resolution, I couldn't resist.

I'm having trouble, now, remembering what I knew about Mellenby's timeline before writing this, and what precisely is or isn't canon. Can I ask--and if you don't have time to answer or think of specifics, that's more than understandable--what you found confusing about it? If it's something I can clear up easily for future readers, I'd love to do that.

Again, thank you, reading this was a joy.

Re: Routine Maintenance

[galadriel1010]

I'm back. Sorry for the very delayed response, work has been A Thing.

Now let's nerd out.

I could not tell that sex scenes are not your usual wheelhouse, you wrote it with confidence and panache.

As for David's timeline, I've searched my notes and can't work out now what's canon and what's my plucked from mid air dates, but I am partway through a reread and will let you know if I find anything. For some reason I have the 1950s in my head as when he died but I may be wrong on that one. I did have a bit of a struggle trying to work out where you'd put the construction of the wards, basically because the arithmetic was a bit beyond what my brain can handle without a pen and paper. Trying to work out when the story is set, then how long Nightingale has been maintaining the wards, and therefore how long they've been there... and honestly, I came up with a different year every time I tried it and eventually gave up and just enjoyed the story.

[kanadka]

(nb: I reviewed Greenwood, Swallowed by the Moon, and A Guiding Light!)

I'm very woefully underprepared to give you any possible concrit in terms of pastiche accuracy and voice where regency anything is concerned - alas, this isn't my wheelhouse. BUT. I have to tell you I read the first two chapters of What You Will aka your brilliant f/f Marriage of Convenience origfic WIP and I just fell so completely in love I had to finish the entire thing. (I stayed up late and made some Very Bad Decisions. I regret nothing!) I'll drop those comments in the next few days.

In the same theme, I also read another historical crossdressing fic of yours - Greenwood, though, since that one is so much shorter and less drawn out, they're a priori very different: in 'Greenwood', the conflict isn't drawn out, the question of Robin's gender isn't a huge mystery, the larger mystery in this fic is more, what relation is real Robin to the myth, and what gender is the myth. It's Robin's POV to begin with, so we know how she thinks of herself. If anything, Greenwood is really one of those *record scratch* *freeze frame* 'Yep, that's me' type moments, though a little less comic and a little more 'I'm about to be hanged' :'D

The first half of the text is on the dense side - Robin is clearly very observant, and there's clearly much to observe. I think I would have appreciated a tendency towards shorter sentences for the first few paragraphs to be able to properly hook the reader a little bit, but one thing you do establish promptly and well is that Robin is female, but clearly pretending as male today, as well as for all of her business as an outlaw: “I thank you, sir,” she said, pitching her voice low as Alan had taught her, as she was used to among all but her own men. Her company voice, John called it. This neatly obviates any potential guesswork about where the Rule 63'ing is happening.

I think it's really interesting too that your take on Robin has her reading people en route to her own execution - grifting always requires a certain amount of being able to read people, so it makes some sense for Robin, but she's not using those skills at the moment to find marks. In fact, there's a lot of great and subtle characterisation on Robin in this, but it can be a little obscured by the generally slower pace of the text:

Robin Hood was another matter, though. He must not die in fear. Robin made herself take a last long breath and look out over the gathered crowd. There was a girl nearby, standing beside her father and brothers. She was not yet old enough to cover her hair, and the knees of her best dress were stained a deep and grassy green. Thinking of another girl with stained knees and a stubborn chin, a girl who had lived in a forester’s cottage not so long ago, Robin met her staring eyes and winked. Let her take that away from this morning: a conspiracy of common feeling with a living legend, a dying man.

I love this paragraph! But I also really wish it had been split up a little more and things shifted around a bit to improve the pacing; for example putting "...the gathered crowd." and "There was a girl..." into separate paragraphs, and possibly putting "Robin Hood was another matter, though. He must not die in fear." along with the previous paragraph. (Or in its own.)

Similarly, the action of the arrow as distraction and Robin's escape from the platform is also packed a little tightly: I might have argued spacing out more paragraphs in this sequence to be able to show the suddenness of the action and how it takes Robin aback too - she's fixing to die, and even though she's done that before too, she seems to have begun this fic with the understanding that maybe a miracle won't save her from death this time. Keeping it in one paragraph as it does sort of feels like she's taking a, 'guess it's Tuesday' casual approach. It took me a few reads to get that she actually does dangle breathlessly for a sec there and the distraction of the arrow isn't splitting her noose and letting her free, it's just distraction and causing enough ruckus for John to slip in. That sort of event should probably be made very clear both for action and characterisation purposes - there's a moment where Robin comes closer to death than she's ever come before. Plus you want to be clear about what's going on, and last but not least obtain quicker pacing through something that should be thrilling.

The rest of the fic is absolutely delightful - dialogue really helps break up the pace, and I love that both John and Robin are masquerading as men, though Robin is a lot more careful than John, it seems. And the loyalty kink between them both is perfection - I have nothing to criticise here, just love. I love John's clearly affectionate but also harried tone towards Robin's shenanigans - John doesn't even appear for very long even but still has a clear voice. The highlight of the whole fic, for me!

--

More thoughts, more related to your two exchange origfics: in both of them, the text is grandiose and eloquent, but sometimes it veers too close towards dancing around what it intends to say. I think, generally speaking, there are probably more words here than need to be, and it bogs down in places. There's a lot of frills and long sentences, there's a lot of attention to detail on the turns of phrase. In fact, perhaps so much that the elegance of the text has a tendency to bury the other qualities of the fic, like the interesting characters, the excellent worldbuilding details, and elements of the relationships of the tag that you may want to lean into. Pluswhich, if I'm paying too great attention to what's taking place because the text is so lofty, I'm not paying enough attention to the sensuality between characters, which means I start to care a lot less about them. Shorter sentences in the exposition would help, as would a tighter POV on the POV character - especially in the first ten or so paragraphs when you're setting the stage.

This is more the case for 'A Guiding Light' than it is for 'Swallowed by the Moon' - Swallowed begins with what almost looks like an action sequence, so that inherently helps pare down the text a little bit and strip it back to a sequence of actions. (And we're also very in Dani's head already!) But you could pare it down even further: shorter sentences, less detail, at least right from the get-go. There's also a lot of dialogue further on in Swallowed, and we hear both women, which adds a lot to improve the pacing of the fic. This is less the case for A Guiding Light, as Kalli doesn't appear until later, but when she does appear I'm very delighted. I think for the first half, both texts could be improved by more dialogue - the parts of 'Swallowed by the Moon' that had dialogue were definitely my favourite parts, and the most comfortably readable. There are super interesting stories here, but they come across as slow and difficult on a first read. (On a second read, though, they're very enjoyable!)

(Another note: A Guiding Light makes for a good story, but also would have been really interesting in an epistolary format. I don't know if you're interested in that, and granted I haven't poked around in the rest of your repertoire nearly as much, so my apologies if you have in fact tried this! But, given your talents, I'd really love to see what kind of work you might do with more unconventional formats - in the case of A Guiding Light, telling the whole story as some archival legal proceedings. Just a thought for future exchanges, in case you might be interested! :D)

Lastly, there's a occasional tendency to default to pronouns perhaps a little too often - but I might have noticed this more because these are both f/f works. One area where this causes particular ambiguity is in cases where a following sentence/clause switches subjects agents, I guess I should say; after a switch, try and default to the name. An example from 'Swallowed by the Moon':

The gardens were on the second level of the convent, overlooking the inner courtyard, and [Dani]_[i] was pruning the flower-studded vines that spilled over the balcony when the outer doors opened to admit a woman_[j] cloaked head to foot in dusty brown. She_{[i?, j?]} looked out, curious...

Is that second 'She' Dani, or the woman? Context reveals it's Dani, but in the final clause in the previous sentence, the subject was the woman (cloaked head to foot...), and this causes some brief ambiguity in the potential for resolution of that second 'she'. (Mea culpa, I forgot how to grammar - she's not the subject in that final clause, but 'admitting her' does appear to introduce her somewhat, so I expect that the next sentence should be further introducing her, but it winds up being Dani. Confusing pronoun resolution, but this one isn't subject + subject. Sorry again, my bad!!) Again, it's quickly resolved in the context of the rest of the sentence, but it gives that jarring kind of garden path feel again. I'm already going back and forth on these sentences because a lot of them are so complex, but now here's another reason to go back and forth - this definitely slowed me down when reading.

You're clearly an absolutely outstanding writer with serious characterisation chops as well as a perceptive sense for natural sounding dialogue and excellent worldbuilding. And you show a very keen and clever eye for aesthetic in prose. So while I have occasionally questioned whether it's consistently being put to effective use in these fics or whether it's used more to strike of a mood than delineate a narrative, I also want to take the time here to add that it's entirely possible that 'mood over narrative' is in fact exactly what you had intended to begin with. Especially in the case of 'A Guiding Light', which was for a darker-leaning f/f exchange, and might have intended to reflect that mood. There's a lot of word-painting here, and you're a very skilled artist.

I really hope some of this feedback has been useful to you! You also wrote: I love writing pastiche and changing up my style based on the fandom and type of story. Would appreciate notes on how the chosen voice, POV, and style does or doesn't work. - and I have to admit that I don't see a lot of change in terms of style, but I'm pretty sure this is because of the subset of your work that I was able to look at. I'm afraid I don't know any of your other fandoms, so I think this is really a selection bias thing here. I therefore hope you won't think that my lack of comment on varied styles means there are no varied styles.

But thank you so much for the wonderful reads - I especially liked 'Swallowed by the Moon' for its spectacular worldbuilding, but it's hard to pick a favourite. :D

[pendrecarc]

Hi! i just want to say I haven't had much fandom brain space this week, and your feedback is so wonderful and meaty that I'm still letting it percolate, but my goodness, thank you. This is great, I'll be back, and thinking through your positive and negative reactions is going to be so useful to me. Thank you ever so much for taking the time not only to read multiple works of mine but to write this.