Concrit for regshoe

[regshoe]

I want to receive feedback by : Email (esmereldamargaretnotespelling@gmail.com) or comment on this post.

Here are the works I want feedback on (optional: and my safe works are...): My works are here—any of these would be fine! I'd especially like feedback on fic for Flight of the Heron, my current main fandom. If you don't know my main fandoms and don't want to read without knowing canon, you could try one of the stories I've written for various short ballads and fairytales.

My works' fandoms and content notes are: My main fandoms are Flight of the Heron, Raffles and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and I've also written for various other old book fandoms and ballad/fairytale fandoms—all tagged on AO3. Archive warnings are tagged where relevant—the CNTWs are all for borderline Major Character Death and do not contain any other archive warning content—and more specific warnings are included in the author's notes.

I have these questions for readers: Really, I'd like to know about anything that occurs to you to comment on! I would especially like feedback on characterisation: if you know the fandom, do the characters feel true to their canon selves? if you don't, do you feel you get a good sense of who they are? if it's a ballad/fairytale fic which builds character from a small amount of canon, is this done well? Comments on pacing, structure and plot development would also be good, particularly if it's a longer fic.

The style of feedback I prefer to receive is: I'd like to hear about both good and bad things; I don't mind directness, and would welcome specific thoughts on how I might improve anything that didn't work.

Comments to this post will be: unscreened.

Comments

Feedback: A Propitious Season of Living

[osteophage]

Hi! Thanks for signing up for Concrit-X. Since I'm not familiar with any of the fandoms you've written for, I decided to go with A Propitious Season of Living.

First I want to give you props for the vintage-feeling narration style. I get the sense that this is a style you're practiced and comfortable with, so maybe you take it as a matter of course, but I've definitely seen people go for older-sounding prose and completely mangle it. Part of what cinches it is your use of dashes and asides, I think. There's a hefty, elaborate, meandering feeling to the syntax that I associate with Victorian novels, and it shows you know how to pay attention to sentence-level structure.

Where you can turn that attention to next is to narrative-level structure. For this genre I understand it's expected for stories to be pretty loose and quiet in their pacing, but even so, I have some specific thoughts.

First, I want to point out your use of what I'll call preview sentences. These are sentences at the lead of a scene or segment that set the tone and warn us of what's about to happen next, which help with the pacing and generating interest. Sentences like "It was the next day that Becky's illness began to get worse" and "One day things reached a crisis" work like this. Those are some good ones, and I'd like to see more. For instance, I would have liked a more ominous note like that in the first sentence, which currently reads, "Of all the windows in London — all the lighted windows sending their warm, happy glow out onto the cold grey pavements of this gloomy March evening — none presented a happier view to the passer-by than this one." This definitely sounds cheerful, but (perhaps as a matter of personal taste) I'd prefer a hint of the trouble yet to come. While reading, I found the story to move faster in the second half than in the first, and I think that sense of initial "slowness" wasn't so much about the actual events as it was a hankering for more little hooks and warnings, if that makes sense.

Second, around the time of Becky's confession, I found myself wondering about Becky's POV. I understand you may have a purpose in sticking with Sara, so I'm just explaining where my mind was at during this point. I imagine there would be an interesting internal conflict going on over her guilt and sense of duty vs. a fear of speaking her mind. Becky's "I should have been able to stand it" is a very expected perspective, from what I can glean of her character, but I also wonder if Becky's "Thank you, miss" that concludes this conversation was just to close the subject, out of reluctance to argue with Sara. If we had access to Becky's thoughts, then we could see the contrast between those thoughts and her outward behavior. As it is, Sara's POV doesn't provide us with any clues that would hint at that, and so it seems like kind of an abruptly easy resolution.

Third, Sara's personal realization being placed right before Becky's recovery makes it feel like a narrative turning point. I don't know if you meant to imply that Sara's realization makes her get better, but it makes me wonder what kind of narrative significance I should read into that moment. I would be interested in seeing that fleshed out with a sharper contrast between Sara's mentality before and after. If that would be diverging from your intentions with the scene, though, then maybe something else (a realization on Becky's part, not Sara's?) would be a better fit for this spot.

Lastly, I noticed there's a lot of attention to plants here. I appreciate that. You've got a keen sense for atmospheric details, and even though I don't know most of the species named, it makes for a lot of lovely imagery in a way that's very fitting for the spirit of the story.

Re: Feedback: A Propitious Season of Living

[regshoe]

Thank you very much for this! You've given me a lot to think about, and your comments are very helpful. That point about 'preview sentences' gets at something I was aware of in writing and reading but hadn't articulated specifically to myself as a thing, which is an especially useful thing to get from concrit. And I appreciate your other points about Becky's POV and the story's structure. What I had in mind in that last scene was just the external-narrative appropriateness, I suppose, of having the hurt/comfort plot of Becky's illness and the emotional relationship/class stuff resolve at the same time, but I see what you mean about the vagueness of the implications there. Anyway, I shall mull all this over, and keep these things in mind for future writing. :)

(On an unrelated note—I thought I vaguely recognised your username, and following links from your profile, you write The Ace Theist? I got a lot out of reading that blog and your stuff on The Asexual Agenda when I was learning about the ace community a few years ago! Small world.)

Re: Feedback: A Propitious Season of Living

[osteophage]

Glad it was coherent, lol. With my other Concrit-X match, I accidentally based some feedback on a misunderstanding, and we had to talk it over for me to figure out where I went wrong.

And yep, The Ace Theist is me! Small world indeed. Glad I could help there too.

Re: Feedback: A Propitious Season of Living

[regshoe]

Oh dear! I hope the misunderstanding was still useful, though–I always like to hear when people have misunderstood things in my writing, because it tells me where I perhaps needed to explain things more clearly.

[paulamcg]

Oh, I'm sorry about the coincidence, which I've noticed only now, after emailing my feedback on the same fic as your other concritter (having chosen the fic, and read it and the canon more than a week ago).

[regshoe]

No worries—it's interesting to get two perspectives on the same story! Thanks for the concrit, to which I will reply properly once I've had a chance to digest it. :)

[anonne]

Hello! I’m just about familiar with Raffles so I had a look at Lovely on the Water. You pull off the pastiche really well and the subtle references to Raffles and Bunny’s relationship blend in very effectively. I think that can be one of the real challenges of the “pastiche but make it more overtly slashy” style, but none of it seems out of place here. Beyond that, you evoke the setting very well in the way you refer to the seasons and all the features of the natural world. It made me feel very nostalgic about the short time I spent living in south-east England even if it was over a century later!

I’m really impressed by how you mimic Hornung’s writing style; there were a few things that I thought might not be quite right, but when I looked back at the canon I found the same features there. There was just one thing – to be very pedantic! – that seemed slightly off to me, which was your use of “agreed” as a quotative, in the phrase “agreed Raffles”. It just didn’t sound quite right to me, especially in that inverted format, and when I had a look over the canon it seemed like the verbs typically used in that phrase related more directly to the act of speaking: I found “cried”, “murmured”, “whispered”, “continued”, “exclaimed”, and “laughed”, as well as the obvious “said”. To me, “agreed” doesn’t quite fit in with those – it seems less directly related to speaking, I think. I feel like that’s a ludicrously specific point to make, but I hope it doesn’t seem too out of place.

I think the second angst section (by which I mean from “I was unable to stand the continual lightness of his tone” to the end) blends in with the plot very well, and the story transitions effectively from more action-driven to more emotion-driven material; I was slightly less sure about the similar earlier section (from “That book of yours” to the end of that scene). I just wondered if the scene could be expanded slightly, and perhaps made a bit less subtle in places, to really root it in the story and make it clear how the characters feel at this point. When Raffles says “had we known that such a to-morrow as this were to follow”, I just feel like it would be good to have slightly detail on why this is significant at this point, and what Raffles understands his own assertion to mean.

Overall, as I said, I’m very impressed by how you pull off the style! You clearly know this canon extremely well, and you write for it with a lot of skill.

[regshoe]

Thank you very much! Aww, I'm glad the setting was effective enough to inspire nostalgia. :) That point about 'agreed' isn't ludicrous at all, that's just the kind of detail I like paying attention to! —and in this case I suspect it may have slipped over from my other main fandom, whose author uses 'agreed' in that way more often. And your thoughts on the subtlety of the angst scene are useful too—getting the right level of subtlety is a particular challenge with Raffles, I find. I'll keep these points in mind! :)

[eglantiere]

i read Concerning the Language of Birds, for a treat (mine as well!), and loved it a lot.

I think it did a really great job of delivering both the prose and the study (nothing "happens", per se, it's observations and conversations) and the clear emotional beat/theme (just as Piranesi/Matthew did, Sarah learns to bring the mindful calm and clarity of the House into the living world instead of dissolving into the House fully.) It's actually not where I thought the scene would go, and that pivot in the ending really gripped me, and made me feel the same happy/bittersweet jolt the ending of Piranesi did.

And to me, Sarah's inner voice rang true as well - she's careful and attentive, in her own way and style, and she considers her words and actions slowly and precisely, and she's drawn into the beauty of the House without - I think - being unduly seduced by it...

My favorite bit of imagery was, I think, the rooks: Two dozen or so rooks were scattered over the statues that covered the wall before her. The weak, colourless daylight suited the scene very well: black birds with grey faces perched on statues of white marble, which were fouled here and there by black-and-white droppings. But the rooks' feathers defied the gloom, conjuring brilliant iridescent shades of green and purple from the movements the birds made, jostling for position on the statues and flapping their ragged wings.

[regshoe]

Aww, thank you very much! That one was a bit of a challenge, writing in a new fandom and in a (er, kind of) modern setting, so I'm glad the structure and character voice worked for you. :)