I chose your story "things look different from here". I'm not familiar with Discovery beyond having heard chatter about it when it was airing & looking up the tagged characters just now on Memory Alpha, but this story really caught my eye anyway and I like what you did with it!
Q: do you get a good sense of who the characters are and do they seem internally consistent? Yes! I mean, that was what pulled me to pick this story, because I really liked Tilly without knowing anything more about her than what you included in your story.
Q: are the characters' emotions conveyed well in general? Future Tilly's emotions and emotional arc were really good! I wish we'd gotten a bit more of a glimpse of her past self's emotions, because Sylvia's mostly just sounding disbelieving/looking skeptical the whole time until May shows up and then we don't really get much insight into Sylvia's emotions after that point. It felt like the whole fic was very focused on future Tilly with past Tilly mostly serving as a MacGuffin for Tilly to interact with. Which is fine, and helps keeps from raising to much of an issue of whether Tilly's affecting the past with this conversation, but I just wished past Tilly had gotten a little more to do than just be skeptical and try to keep May from figuring out who future Tilly was.
Q: Does the dialogue flow well? Yes! Sometimes, I think how well it's flowing may be backfiring a tad though, and leading you to keep up the back-and-forth when it could stand to be broken up by a bit more description. Might be something to look at on a second draft, once you've got all that back-and-forth in place and thinking about description isn't going to mess up your writing flow as much.
Q: Is the prose in general written well, and is there a good balance of description vs. dialogue vs. narration vs. POV characters' thoughts? This kind of connects of with my previous answer; I think for the most part the balance is okay but it's definitely very dialogue driven & description-light. I'd suggest experimenting with adding in more description of what characters are doing and see what you think of the resulting balance.
The one bit that jumped out at me as feeling particularly imbalanced was the end of the fic. From "Let's go, Sylvia," on, every single paragraph is only one line long (at least on my monitor). I would have liked a bit more variation here, probably using some description tossed in somewhere to break things up (off the top of my head, maybe a bit more about Michael's and Owosekun's expressions/appearances when Tilly sees them? Or something else around that transition from the high school back to the cave.)
Q: Does it start and end in places/ways that work for you? I think both the first line and the last line are very strong! That first line is so evocative, and within two paragraphs I have a very good understanding of what's going on, which is great! As for the ending, I felt like the way things wrapped up was maybe a tad abrupt (probably connected to what I was saying above about the short paragraphs in that section), but I don't think that's a big deal because obviously the previous interaction was more the point of the story than anything that's happening after she returns to her own time; and the "she's gonna be fine"/"No. She's gonna be amazing." exchange is a great ending. I obviously don't know much about the character outside what I encountered in your story, but from what I learned about Tilly in your story, the ending seems just right for her!
Q: Feedback on summary/title/tags The summary has a strong voice to it that pulled me in! If you wanted more tags, two that come to mind (which is a bit hypocritical on my part because I'm prone to sparse tagging myself) would be "High school" & something along the lines of "Meeting yourself"/"Meeting past self"—I can't seem to find a canonical tag for that, which is too bad because it's such a great trope! And it's also a trope that's very central to this fic.
A few smaller things
She looked down at herself. Still in her Starfleet uniform. Her hand flew to her mouth. No orthodontic implant. I'd punctuate this differently; here at first glance it seems to be four equally-separate sentences/fragments, and I'd be inclined to indicate that they actually pair up a bit (whether that's putting each pair closer together with an em dash or colon instead of a period, or splitting the non-paired portion further apart with a paragraph break after "uniform").
“I’m not really sure.” The para that starts with this is way too massive. Each time I read through, I found my eyes skipping over parts of it. Maybe this was intentional to show how Tilly is just going on and on and can't stop herself rambling, but if so I think it overshoots because there's just so much that I can't take it all in. You've got 17% of your word count in this paragraph alone.
On the logistics side...Of course, splitting it up is a bit more complicated because it's all the same person talking. Two possibilities that come to mind might include a paragraph break on either side of the italics portion, and/or having Tilly note (in an interposed paragraph) how Sylvia is reacting to this datadump—you mention afterwards that she looks skeptical, but was she listening intently the whole time vs. getting distracted? A sentence about that could be in a fresh paragraph to break things up a bit.
Tilly noticed an odd look on Sylvia’s face. -> Tilly whipped her hands behind her back, hoping May hadn’t noticed. -> May was definitely giving her a funny look now. The "definitely" seems to imply that Tilly had previously thought May might be giving her a look, or otherwise that there was an in-between step between thinking she had a chance that May hadn't noticed anything and then "definitely giving her a funny look". I would have preferred if there was just a bit more information in the prose on the exact choreography here, because the other thing I was left wondering at the end of the story was whether the girls saw Tilly disappear in front of their faces, or if they'd turned to walk away—their conversation does sound like it's no longer including Tilly, so I got the impression that might have been the case (though obviously they're facing her at least long enough for her to see her younger self wrinkle her nose), but it would have been nice to have a bit of description to make things clear one way or the other.
Anyway, I really enjoyed your story and I hope I came up with some helpful things to say about it!
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 07:03 am (UTC)Q: do you get a good sense of who the characters are and do they seem internally consistent? Yes! I mean, that was what pulled me to pick this story, because I really liked Tilly without knowing anything more about her than what you included in your story.
Q: are the characters' emotions conveyed well in general? Future Tilly's emotions and emotional arc were really good! I wish we'd gotten a bit more of a glimpse of her past self's emotions, because Sylvia's mostly just sounding disbelieving/looking skeptical the whole time until May shows up and then we don't really get much insight into Sylvia's emotions after that point. It felt like the whole fic was very focused on future Tilly with past Tilly mostly serving as a MacGuffin for Tilly to interact with. Which is fine, and helps keeps from raising to much of an issue of whether Tilly's affecting the past with this conversation, but I just wished past Tilly had gotten a little more to do than just be skeptical and try to keep May from figuring out who future Tilly was.
Q: Does the dialogue flow well? Yes! Sometimes, I think how well it's flowing may be backfiring a tad though, and leading you to keep up the back-and-forth when it could stand to be broken up by a bit more description. Might be something to look at on a second draft, once you've got all that back-and-forth in place and thinking about description isn't going to mess up your writing flow as much.
Q: Is the prose in general written well, and is there a good balance of description vs. dialogue vs. narration vs. POV characters' thoughts? This kind of connects of with my previous answer; I think for the most part the balance is okay but it's definitely very dialogue driven & description-light. I'd suggest experimenting with adding in more description of what characters are doing and see what you think of the resulting balance.
The one bit that jumped out at me as feeling particularly imbalanced was the end of the fic. From "Let's go, Sylvia," on, every single paragraph is only one line long (at least on my monitor). I would have liked a bit more variation here, probably using some description tossed in somewhere to break things up (off the top of my head, maybe a bit more about Michael's and Owosekun's expressions/appearances when Tilly sees them? Or something else around that transition from the high school back to the cave.)
Q: Does it start and end in places/ways that work for you? I think both the first line and the last line are very strong! That first line is so evocative, and within two paragraphs I have a very good understanding of what's going on, which is great! As for the ending, I felt like the way things wrapped up was maybe a tad abrupt (probably connected to what I was saying above about the short paragraphs in that section), but I don't think that's a big deal because obviously the previous interaction was more the point of the story than anything that's happening after she returns to her own time; and the "she's gonna be fine"/"No. She's gonna be amazing." exchange is a great ending. I obviously don't know much about the character outside what I encountered in your story, but from what I learned about Tilly in your story, the ending seems just right for her!
Q: Feedback on summary/title/tags The summary has a strong voice to it that pulled me in! If you wanted more tags, two that come to mind (which is a bit hypocritical on my part because I'm prone to sparse tagging myself) would be "High school" & something along the lines of "Meeting yourself"/"Meeting past self"—I can't seem to find a canonical tag for that, which is too bad because it's such a great trope! And it's also a trope that's very central to this fic.
A few smaller things
She looked down at herself. Still in her Starfleet uniform. Her hand flew to her mouth. No orthodontic implant. I'd punctuate this differently; here at first glance it seems to be four equally-separate sentences/fragments, and I'd be inclined to indicate that they actually pair up a bit (whether that's putting each pair closer together with an em dash or colon instead of a period, or splitting the non-paired portion further apart with a paragraph break after "uniform").
“I’m not really sure.” The para that starts with this is way too massive. Each time I read through, I found my eyes skipping over parts of it. Maybe this was intentional to show how Tilly is just going on and on and can't stop herself rambling, but if so I think it overshoots because there's just so much that I can't take it all in. You've got 17% of your word count in this paragraph alone.
On the logistics side...Of course, splitting it up is a bit more complicated because it's all the same person talking. Two possibilities that come to mind might include a paragraph break on either side of the italics portion, and/or having Tilly note (in an interposed paragraph) how Sylvia is reacting to this datadump—you mention afterwards that she looks skeptical, but was she listening intently the whole time vs. getting distracted? A sentence about that could be in a fresh paragraph to break things up a bit.
Tilly noticed an odd look on Sylvia’s face. -> Tilly whipped her hands behind her back, hoping May hadn’t noticed. -> May was definitely giving her a funny look now. The "definitely" seems to imply that Tilly had previously thought May might be giving her a look, or otherwise that there was an in-between step between thinking she had a chance that May hadn't noticed anything and then "definitely giving her a funny look". I would have preferred if there was just a bit more information in the prose on the exact choreography here, because the other thing I was left wondering at the end of the story was whether the girls saw Tilly disappear in front of their faces, or if they'd turned to walk away—their conversation does sound like it's no longer including Tilly, so I got the impression that might have been the case (though obviously they're facing her at least long enough for her to see her younger self wrinkle her nose), but it would have been nice to have a bit of description to make things clear one way or the other.
Anyway, I really enjoyed your story and I hope I came up with some helpful things to say about it!