- Joined
- Feb 4, 2013
The first thing people usually notice about me: this one time, in college, I wrote a paper about the media.
حلال Connor Bible - Everyone's Favorite Molly Ringwald loving, adoption hating, aspiring writer and bellybutton fucker
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The first thing people usually notice about me: this one time, in college, I wrote a paper about the media.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
(original)
(original)
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2015
- Joined
- May 18, 2014
"I'm a bit of a brainiac"
I just facepalmed so hard I broke my nose.
I just facepalmed so hard I broke my nose.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
It's a joke. Connor was surprisingly open about jerking off to Molly Ringwaldd, the opening of EoE fits that to a T. Plus we knew he's an NGE fan.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
This word document appeared to me in a dream, thanks Illuminati.
PART THE FIRST: PRAISE THE SUN
The dream was always the same.
She was lying on the grass, staring at the sun and undressing it with her eyes. It was beautiful, there was nothing quite like stellar fusion to get those crotch juices flowing and since it was a dream the risk of permanent eye damage was minimal even in the worst case scenario. There was no one around to get in the way of their love, not even the clouds. For the first time since the last time she had this exact dream (which for those keeping score was the previous night) she could feel some feels but like for reals. Even though she couldn’t hope to understand or describe what she felt without first consulting a tumblr blog about alternative sexualities the only fuck she could give was the one reserved for Mr. Sun way up there.
The city was surprisingly quiet, like a mime someone just kicked in the balls. She lived there for the longest time, somewhere between 13.8 billion and six thousand years depending on who you asked. Too bad she fit in about as well as a penis into a two pronged electrical outlet and lived just as comfortably. Suffice to say that this new emotion, tentatively titled astro-arousal, was much more pleasant.
The water was wet, just like something else nearby except a great deal cleaner. The dream as a whole was a lot like this lake, vague and pretending to be deep. Upon further inspection it became clear that the lake was a kiddy pool made entirely of pepperoni. In some ways it was a more fitting description of the dream.
Suddenly the symbolism descended from the sky. A butterfly meant to inform the reader that whoever wrote this is a genius* beat its wings like an unfaithful wife. The butterfly gently floated down and landed on her hand. It interrupted some perfectly good astro-arousal like it always did with its demands for a good snack to go with its lunch.
No matter how much she insisted that she was busy the butterfly assured her it wouldn’t take long to help out. Before she could get flustered enough to squash it the butterfly did what it always did, flew toward the water.
She felt another feel very much unlike astro-arousal. The sort of feeling you get when a talking butterfly demands that you give them food while you’re trying to fantasize about fucking the sun. She ran after that fluttery son of a bitch as slow as she possibly could, savouring every moment. The sun then ceased to exist and the rain pissed down.
The butterfly dove into the lake and she soon followed. Plunging through the water she realized her mistake. The lake was filled with bees.
And bees
And bees
OH GOD THE BEES
Eva Elliot had this nightmare for the past three months.
Author’s note: It was my dream for the past three months to do something with bees. *They are a genius.
-----
PART THE SECOND: STINKY PUSSY BITCH
“One month, two months, three months, ah ha ha,” Holden Elliot replied. “Nice dude.”
Though she paid for the whole bed she only needed the edge to gaze longingly out the window and think of what could have been. The sheets were soaked with Mtn Dew voltage, not sweat and/or the peepee such as. She would argue/streetrace this point to the grave. Outside was rainy with a high chance of dreariness, but a low chance of bees. Eva liked those odds.
“Why didn’t you tell me, are you a fuckin’ spastic?” Holden asked.
“Because I’m too moody and cynical to do that, this is all very triggering.” Eva replied, brushing her cheek against her shoulder like a very confused cat trying to clean itself. In the process of doing so she locked eyes with fag dad. He looked like he was fucking pigs all morning, probably because he was.
“Another reason I didn’t tell you is because of THE BIG GAME,” Eva added.
Holden twirled his cartoon villain moustache. “You should know very well that THE TEAM can straight up jack kids from the schools and turn them into fucking cyborgs or some shit. I wouldn’t let you get you get involved in THE BIG GAME because you’d blow it when it really counts.”
Eva hated cyborgs because they were fucking sick and she was merely a sick fuck. That was one thing she wished didn’t run in the family. “Gee whiz dad, nobody in that place in TEAM HEADQUARTERS really cares about the things that really matter, like skeleton rights and otherkin-friendly bathrooms.”
“What makes you say that?” Holden asked before immediately answering his own question. “Oh right, you’re a fuckin’ spastic. That’s why Klaus likes you so much.”
Eva furrowed her brow and fronted with her strongest headmate, Tarzan of the Apes. She did not like the man named Klaus, and she would not like him with a mouse. “I’m not a fucking spastic dad, it’s called natural multiplicity.”
Holden humoured his daughter, knowing the sooner she shut up the sooner he could return to pigfucking or whatever exactly it was that he does with his time. “Sorry dear, I always get those mixed up. Anyway the important thing to remember is your mom died and it was nobody’s fault, especially not mine.”
Eva zoned out, every time someone mentioned her mother she found herself back at the park. Cheryl Elliot had become a fish, a fat bloated one at that, with dead soulless eyes staring right back at Eva.
“I’ll never trust gypsies again.”
Holden smiled, satisfied in teaching his daughter an important lesson about the lesser races of the world. “That’s my girl. Let’s get your ass to school.”
Author’s note: I have no idea why I replaced the corporation/project names with THE BIG GAME and other such things.
--------
PART THE THIRD: YOU IDIOT, YOU ARE SO DUMB
“How is cyberbullying real? Nigga just walk away from the computer,” the school nurse advised.
With her bifocals, Eva could see the world with the clarity that only a pair of bifocals could provide. With her bifocals assisting her vision she could see that the nurse had accidentally ingested retard puke recently. With the amazing power of bifocals she could also see why kids loved the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but that’s another tale for another time.
“That doesn’t mean that people should be allowed to leave blue arms untagged in their posts. What if someone saw it and went out and pepper sprayed a guy from sensory overload?” Eva’s voice was like the sea, fast and nice, maybe gonna hit it up with a little spice like my boy T-dubs in the club.
The nurse jotted something down on her clipboard before announcing her diagnosis. “Bitch you need some #ezpussy @mccafe.”
“What?” Eva was basically owned by the nurse’s bluntness dude. The bifocals didn’t help at all.
“u herd me bich go get dick or pussy if ur feggggggggg #skeltn #fukobeme #nurstyce @dennysdiner” The nurse paused midsentence to show Eva several pictures of skeletons smoking weed interspersed with a few blank pages. “dud lets get blazed like skeleletons like basically #summerslam #tipsntricks.”
Eva could hardly process what was happening. “Nurse, what is this?”
“fuk u obeme ff #p #pronk #pronk!” Eva slowly backed away as the nurse began to hurl matchbox cars in her direction. Without a word she returned to the main halls of Ghetto High for the Urban Youth. Using her bifocally enhanced vision Eva had no trouble finding the class she should have been in this whole time.
Her teacher, Ms. Pickens and all the students welcomed Eva in unison. “You idiot, you are so dumb, wow.” Everyone hated Eva, mostly because she was a stinky pussy bitch, but also so that she could plausibly adopt an extremely cynical world view as a coping mechanism for an irrationally cruel world.
Everyone reminded Eva that her mom was dead and laughed about it. The topic of the day was schadenfreude and everyone seemed to have a pretty good grasp on it. Delighting in Eva’s suffering was America’s favorite sport.
Brian Hicks, the local jackass, reminded Eva once again that her mother was dead and that she was probably adopted. Ms. Pickens gave him extra credit for his mastery of the course material when Eva stormed out of class.
Author’s note: This part’s title literally comes74 from what people in the hall were yelling74 as I started to write this part. Nice synchronism dude 7:04PM.
The dream was always the same.
She was lying on the grass, staring at the sun and undressing it with her eyes. It was beautiful, there was nothing quite like stellar fusion to get those crotch juices flowing and since it was a dream the risk of permanent eye damage was minimal even in the worst case scenario. There was no one around to get in the way of their love, not even the clouds. For the first time since the last time she had this exact dream (which for those keeping score was the previous night) she could feel some feels but like for reals. Even though she couldn’t hope to understand or describe what she felt without first consulting a tumblr blog about alternative sexualities the only fuck she could give was the one reserved for Mr. Sun way up there.
The city was surprisingly quiet, like a mime someone just kicked in the balls. She lived there for the longest time, somewhere between 13.8 billion and six thousand years depending on who you asked. Too bad she fit in about as well as a penis into a two pronged electrical outlet and lived just as comfortably. Suffice to say that this new emotion, tentatively titled astro-arousal, was much more pleasant.
The water was wet, just like something else nearby except a great deal cleaner. The dream as a whole was a lot like this lake, vague and pretending to be deep. Upon further inspection it became clear that the lake was a kiddy pool made entirely of pepperoni. In some ways it was a more fitting description of the dream.
Suddenly the symbolism descended from the sky. A butterfly meant to inform the reader that whoever wrote this is a genius* beat its wings like an unfaithful wife. The butterfly gently floated down and landed on her hand. It interrupted some perfectly good astro-arousal like it always did with its demands for a good snack to go with its lunch.
No matter how much she insisted that she was busy the butterfly assured her it wouldn’t take long to help out. Before she could get flustered enough to squash it the butterfly did what it always did, flew toward the water.
She felt another feel very much unlike astro-arousal. The sort of feeling you get when a talking butterfly demands that you give them food while you’re trying to fantasize about fucking the sun. She ran after that fluttery son of a bitch as slow as she possibly could, savouring every moment. The sun then ceased to exist and the rain pissed down.
The butterfly dove into the lake and she soon followed. Plunging through the water she realized her mistake. The lake was filled with bees.
And bees
And bees
OH GOD THE BEES
Eva Elliot had this nightmare for the past three months.
Author’s note: It was my dream for the past three months to do something with bees. *They are a genius.
-----
PART THE SECOND: STINKY PUSSY BITCH
“One month, two months, three months, ah ha ha,” Holden Elliot replied. “Nice dude.”
Though she paid for the whole bed she only needed the edge to gaze longingly out the window and think of what could have been. The sheets were soaked with Mtn Dew voltage, not sweat and/or the peepee such as. She would argue/streetrace this point to the grave. Outside was rainy with a high chance of dreariness, but a low chance of bees. Eva liked those odds.
“Why didn’t you tell me, are you a fuckin’ spastic?” Holden asked.
“Because I’m too moody and cynical to do that, this is all very triggering.” Eva replied, brushing her cheek against her shoulder like a very confused cat trying to clean itself. In the process of doing so she locked eyes with fag dad. He looked like he was fucking pigs all morning, probably because he was.
“Another reason I didn’t tell you is because of THE BIG GAME,” Eva added.
Holden twirled his cartoon villain moustache. “You should know very well that THE TEAM can straight up jack kids from the schools and turn them into fucking cyborgs or some shit. I wouldn’t let you get you get involved in THE BIG GAME because you’d blow it when it really counts.”
Eva hated cyborgs because they were fucking sick and she was merely a sick fuck. That was one thing she wished didn’t run in the family. “Gee whiz dad, nobody in that place in TEAM HEADQUARTERS really cares about the things that really matter, like skeleton rights and otherkin-friendly bathrooms.”
“What makes you say that?” Holden asked before immediately answering his own question. “Oh right, you’re a fuckin’ spastic. That’s why Klaus likes you so much.”
Eva furrowed her brow and fronted with her strongest headmate, Tarzan of the Apes. She did not like the man named Klaus, and she would not like him with a mouse. “I’m not a fucking spastic dad, it’s called natural multiplicity.”
Holden humoured his daughter, knowing the sooner she shut up the sooner he could return to pigfucking or whatever exactly it was that he does with his time. “Sorry dear, I always get those mixed up. Anyway the important thing to remember is your mom died and it was nobody’s fault, especially not mine.”
Eva zoned out, every time someone mentioned her mother she found herself back at the park. Cheryl Elliot had become a fish, a fat bloated one at that, with dead soulless eyes staring right back at Eva.
“I’ll never trust gypsies again.”
Holden smiled, satisfied in teaching his daughter an important lesson about the lesser races of the world. “That’s my girl. Let’s get your ass to school.”
Author’s note: I have no idea why I replaced the corporation/project names with THE BIG GAME and other such things.
--------
PART THE THIRD: YOU IDIOT, YOU ARE SO DUMB
“How is cyberbullying real? Nigga just walk away from the computer,” the school nurse advised.
With her bifocals, Eva could see the world with the clarity that only a pair of bifocals could provide. With her bifocals assisting her vision she could see that the nurse had accidentally ingested retard puke recently. With the amazing power of bifocals she could also see why kids loved the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but that’s another tale for another time.
“That doesn’t mean that people should be allowed to leave blue arms untagged in their posts. What if someone saw it and went out and pepper sprayed a guy from sensory overload?” Eva’s voice was like the sea, fast and nice, maybe gonna hit it up with a little spice like my boy T-dubs in the club.
The nurse jotted something down on her clipboard before announcing her diagnosis. “Bitch you need some #ezpussy @mccafe.”
“What?” Eva was basically owned by the nurse’s bluntness dude. The bifocals didn’t help at all.
“u herd me bich go get dick or pussy if ur feggggggggg #skeltn #fukobeme #nurstyce @dennysdiner” The nurse paused midsentence to show Eva several pictures of skeletons smoking weed interspersed with a few blank pages. “dud lets get blazed like skeleletons like basically #summerslam #tipsntricks.”
Eva could hardly process what was happening. “Nurse, what is this?”
“fuk u obeme ff #p #pronk #pronk!” Eva slowly backed away as the nurse began to hurl matchbox cars in her direction. Without a word she returned to the main halls of Ghetto High for the Urban Youth. Using her bifocally enhanced vision Eva had no trouble finding the class she should have been in this whole time.
Her teacher, Ms. Pickens and all the students welcomed Eva in unison. “You idiot, you are so dumb, wow.” Everyone hated Eva, mostly because she was a stinky pussy bitch, but also so that she could plausibly adopt an extremely cynical world view as a coping mechanism for an irrationally cruel world.
Everyone reminded Eva that her mom was dead and laughed about it. The topic of the day was schadenfreude and everyone seemed to have a pretty good grasp on it. Delighting in Eva’s suffering was America’s favorite sport.
Brian Hicks, the local jackass, reminded Eva once again that her mother was dead and that she was probably adopted. Ms. Pickens gave him extra credit for his mastery of the course material when Eva stormed out of class.
Author’s note: This part’s title literally comes74 from what people in the hall were yelling74 as I started to write this part. Nice synchronism dude 7:04PM.
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Jul 24, 2013
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2013
ENTER EVA
“Three months,” Holden Elliot replied. “Jesus…”
Replied to what? Three months of what? Three months after the dream we just saw? Has she been having this dream for three months?
Eva sat on the edge of her bed and faced the window. The sheets were soaked with the Arctic sweat
No need to capitalize “arctic” in this usage.
that came with the nightmare. It was raining outside, and she heard very faintly the sounds of water drops hitting the roof. The nightmare that had ended was only a prelude to the long, dry opera
I am almost certain this was originally “drama” but that the author thought “opera” was more sophisticated. Operas are traditionally florid and melodramatic and often the characters behave in ways that don’t make a lot of sense so…it works here, I guess. Just weird.
This is the risk of extremely unusual word choices. Unless you use them judiciously, you run the risk of knocking the audience out of their reading headspace and making them consciously aware that they’re reading text. When your audience is already in danger of losing their investment in the story, you don’t want to remind them that there’s other shit they could be doing.
that was her day. Holden was sitting next to her, hands on his knees.
Ah, you crazy kids and your past-progressive tenses. There is nothing, nothing in the world, wrong with just saying “Holden sat next to her.” Any time you can kill a conjugation of “to be,” by all means go for it. It’s not endangered, I promise.
The sound of thunder beyond the walls was delicate, soft.
I am 99% positive that this is a name-drop of the Pink Floyd album The Delicate Sound of Thunder. It’s a very striking image on its own, but it loses something after being popularized by the album.
The dim light from the lamp on Eva’s end table painted the wall with the shadows of her father and herself.
Holy shit. I like this image. That’s actually quite nice. More of this sort of thing, please.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Eva?” Holden asked.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” Eva replied. “It’s not like everything that goes on in my head needs to be known.” Eva brushed her left cheek against her shoulder, and for the first time in the few minutes that she had been up, locked her eyes on the face of her father.
"She" needs to be before "locked" for this to make grammatical sense. Also if that was supposed to be a Dark Tower reference, I'm going to pitch a hissy fit.
Holden’s face was stubbled, rough. His graying hair was uncombed, and was still messy; like Eva, he had just woken up.
These two paragraphs could easily be combine into one, with the description of Holden’s face leading naturally from Eva looking at him. We don’t necessarily need to be told that he’s just woken up; the fact that he’s still rumbled and unshaven is good enough to guess.
“Just because I didn’t ask, it doesn’t mean I don’t care,” Holden said.
“It’s not just that,” Eva said. “Another reason I didn’t tell is because of Catharsis.”
Holden scoffed. “Eve, you know damned well I wouldn’t let you get too deeply involved.”
“You wouldn’t?” Eva asked. “I’m pretty sure that the project’s meant to be hush-hush. Top priority for Prometheus, right?”
Top-secret project, so of course he tells his teenage daughter detailed information about its federal funding.
“Right,” Holden answered. “We’ve already gotten the green light from the FDA, and that was in March. You know how influential the Corporation is here in L.A. All they need to do is call a school, ask for some poor kid’s psych-profile,
"Psych profile" does not need hyphenation.
and provided the parents give consent, they can go ahead with the redesign.”
Wow, this is some awkward exposition. Not only does it contain my least favorite expository transition, the “as you know, Eva” introduction, but it comes in the middle and at the expense of character development. You just went from comforting your daughter after a nightmare to talking about your goddamn FDA approval. Either you are the worst father or you just missed that your suicidal daughter just changed the subject to keep you from pursuing her emotional issues, in which case you’re still the worst father.
I'm trying to grasp exactly what's meant to be happening here. Apparently, Eva's worried that her particular brand of special snowflake cray-cray might make her a prime candidate for the Catharsis treatment, therefore she's been lying about how long she's been having these intense nightmares. I should think basic medical ethics alone would prevent Eva from being eligible for any project on which her father is involved, even if she volunteered for it. Blah-blah-blah, corporations are evil, money talks, blah-blah, handwave the ethics.
Eva hated that term. Redesign. For her, it implied a lack of value. Something she was most certainly guilty of.
It would be really nice if she would expand a little on these feelings. This is honestly the most interesting thoughts she's had so far.
“Once the trials are done, the Corporation’s going to be raking in the dough,” Eva sighed. “No one in that place in Century City really cares about anything big, like ‘benefitting humanity’.”
Lose the scare quotes.
I can't even grapple with the stylistic problems here because the dialogue itself is so blatantly expository. This is not a conversation that real people have; they're just recapping shit for the benefit of the audience. THE CHARACTERS DO NOT KNOW WE'RE HERE, CONNOR.
Holden asked, “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling.” Eva got up off the bed and walked towards the blind. She pushed one down with her index finger, and through the narrow slit, she could see her neighborhood.
Not particularly liking the way these sentences were broken up. This is another one of those spots where I could pass it off as simply not agreeing with a stylistic choice, as there’s nothing technically incorrect about them, but the actions don’t quite flow together; I feel that the action of walking toward the blind and pushing it down with a finger should be combined, and the action of looking through the slit should be its own sentence.
This was a relatively nice looking house
Should be “nice-looking.” Also, this sentence really is misplaced, and with “neighborhood” above, makes it sounds like the entire neighborhood consists of a single nice-looking house. It'd be better as "Theirs was a relatively nice-looking house."
in the suburb.
I feel this should be plural. I also feel as if I’m nitpicking now. But I’m paid to pick nits.
Emphasis on “relatively”. Her father’s modest pay ensured that, over the past eighteen years, she would receive
Holy verb-tenses, Batman! You used future “would” to describe something that went on in the past? I feel there’s a past-perfect that needs to happen here somewhere: “Her father’s modest pay had ensured that she had received…” Still clunky, but not the grammatical clusterfuck it was.
a good education and live in this relatively nice looking house.
“Nice-looking.” And now “lived.”
It could’ve been worse though; on the way to school, Eva had seen the occasional crack cocaine addict or prostitute in broad daylight.
WHICH WAS IT, A CRACK ADDICT OR A PROSTITUTE?
This is just me, but I love the detail of “in broad daylight,.” as if it’s perfectly acceptable for them to come out in the evening, but being out in broad daylight crosses the line.
“Why me?”
“Klaus Krieger thinks that you’re a viable candidate. He’s under the impression that your psychological profile is stable enough.”
So much for medical ethics.
Krieger was, to Eva, a regular Keyser Soze.
And also enough to change her gender, apparently.
"To bring apprehension into her" is an extremely awkward phrase.
She was always apprehensive about people, especially ones that she had never met.
This sentence is dumb and unnecessary.
“Do I have a choice in this?” Eva asked.
“Of course you do,” Holden said. He stood up from the bed, and placed his hand on Eva’s shoulder.
No comma needed in the last sentence. I'd boot that "Holden said" and just change "He" to "Holden."
“You shouldn’t worry yourself to death over it. You’ll ruin your day.”
This dialogue should not be two paragraphs.
“I’m not sure if my day’s already ruined or not,” Eva said.
Holden frowned. “It’s been four years since what happened to your mother. You know you’re not alone in this.”
Damn, the exposition keeps getting clunkier and clunkier. “As you know, Eva, it has been four years since your mother died.” People in real life do not feel the need to relay basic information to one another in this way. Find a different way to exposit.
Eva didn’t respond. Every time that her mother was mentioned, she found herself back at Hollenbeck Park, staring shivering at her mother’s corpse as paramedics took it out of the Chevy, which had become a makeshift aquarium. Cheryl Elliot had become a fish, her face and body bloated, drained.
The image of the car becoming an aquarium is good; the image of her mother becoming a fish is not so good (fish, for the record, do not look either bloated or drained in an aquarium). "Bloated" and "drained" are literally antonyms. She can't be both at once.
Also, serious research fail. It takes a corpse about a week to bloat underwater. Otherwise, water--especially cold water, especially is the body itself is protected from insects and predators by oh, let's say, A CAR--can offset decay for hours if not days. If the car had been underwater long enough for the corpse to bloat, why was her daughter--who would have been all of thirteen or fourteen--allowed to be on the scene? If she was in the accident too (as her shivering seems to indicate), why wasn't she in hospital already?
Her eyes were an abyss, staring into Eva’s. She’d never forget it for as long as she lived.
Which is why EMS would have whisked her the fuck out of there!
Eva said, “I know that, Dad.”
It was the City of Angels, but the angels were crying this morning.
Oh for pete’s sake. This sentence is on the verge of collapsing from its own pretentiousness. We know it’s raining, we know we’re in Los Angeles, and this sentence comes out of nowhere because the author felt it was Deep and Meaningful.
The tears were falling hard and fast beyond the blinds. Eva had already shed her tears for the day; she wiped them off in the darkness just as Holden had walked into her room.
This whole paragraph is oddly out of place and I'm not sure how to correct it. Generally my advice for out-of-place sentences that don't have a home is to chop them. Since the paragraph basically exist solely as life support to the original Deep and Meaningful one, I recommend delete with extreme prejudice.
This was the beginning of another day at Los Angeles High.
We'll talk about this more next chapter, but for now, take a shot every time the full name of Eva's school gets dropped for no reason! Two shots when the name changes subtly from the previous mention!
I don't understand why the fact that this is a school day requires such a formal introduction, though.
Another eight hours of fun and adventure, she thought.
After getting dressed and helping herself to a hurried breakfast, Eva found herself standing in front of the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, staring at the strange girl which returned her gaze.
Oh shit. Oh shit. Are we really doing this scene?
Folks, there is no really elegant way to drop in a character’s physical description, but the “looking in the bathroom mirror” method is one of the most painful. And double points off for playing the scene as “who is this strange person in the mirror? Surely it must be a stranger, for it cannot be—oh! It is I! How can this be?” like Bella Fucking Swan in her wedding gown.
You know what would have been a great moment for describing Eva? Have Holden do it back in the bedroom. It would have seemed more normal for a father to brush his daughter’s bright red bangs from her large brown eyes and be concerned about how thin and pale she is, how the circles under her eyes were like canyons. Character description for Eva, character development for Holden. Everybody wins.
It was human, but in a way, not quite.
In what way? Everything in the description that follows sounds very human. If you want to say "she looked human except for the dead look in her eyes." then go ahead and fucking say that. It's cliched as hell but it's better than nothing at all.
The girl facing her had short red hair, which contrasted the porcelain white skin. She was thin, grotesquely so. Eva asked the girl how long it’s been
Should be "it had been."
since she slept well, or eaten a complete meal.
Didn't you just have breakfast? Also, no comma.
She could sense a heartbeat through the tiny, frowning smiley shirt
Oh for fuck's sake. That description is so confusing. Just say she had a fucking frowny-face shirt. We know what the fucking emoticon looks like.
(Incidentally that shirt gets described I think three more times. Same description each time, as if he fears we'll forget it between mentions.)
And again, kill that comma.
she wore. The eyes were massive and brown, and underneath were bags, canyons really.
Note from the Future: her eyebags are compared to canyons again later.
Just looking at this thing, this creature in the mirror,
Spare me.
Eva felt like vomiting into the nearby toilet. She gulped, holding it back.
Eight hours, she thought.
###
Trivia time! Three hashtags in a manuscript is a tradition from the dead language of typesetting. It comes from a time when manuscripts were produced on typewriters and it signals the end of a manuscript. In fact, when I tried to reproduce it in Word just now, Word automatically translated it into a nice, thick, annoying black bar. A space in a manuscript is formally indicated by Enter, Enter, Center, Single Hashtag, Enter, and resuming text. I expect that not long in the future, the hashtag to indicate “THIS SPACE DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK” is going to go the way of the dinosaur as word processing programs are now able to reproduce text as it will appear in the published work.
TL;DR: Connor thinks he’s writing on a typewriter because that shit's retro and cool, and traditional rigid manuscript guidelines grow increasingly obsolete with the widespread accessibility of superior self-publishing technology. Write the MLA and complain!
Holden’s car was a battered relic out of an old detective film from the forties.
Lose "the forties" and just go with "a battered relic from an old detective film." Or even better, just describe the fucking thing without requiring your readers to have seen The Big Sleep.
For a writer, you sure are asking your readers to do a lot of legwork on these descriptions.
and the interior smelled of booze. On the way to L.A. High,
Drink!
Eva had noticed several steaming manhole covers. This didn’t really feel like Los Angeles anymore. It was more like Noir Angeles. The rain was still falling.
Literally none of these sentences have anything to do with one another.
You know what would have been nice? DESCRIPTION. Instead of telling us “it looked like a noir movie” (and thus making the second movie reference in a single paragraph), describe in noir terms: the rain turns everything black-and-white, with high sharp contrast between shadow and light, the steam is rising in gusts, empty mirror-gloss streets. Then, if you absolutely must, compare it to a movie set.
Throughout the ride, nothing was spoken. This had become second nature to them. They got up, got ready, and went their separate ways.
...except we just saw you having a conversation. A kind of important conversation, actually. Please don't contradict things you just showed me.
And you’re not exactly going your separate ways if you’re both in a car together and he’s driving you to school, Girlie-Girl.
The car came to a stop at the main parking lot of the school. Beyond the windshield, Eva could vaguely see students running into the building to escape the rain.
I hate that whole last sentence and I wish I could set fire to it. Can we get some delineation between the figures of the students being vague and Eva's vision being vague?
“I don’t have to go… Do I, Dad?” she asked.
This is one of those moments when a dialogue tag is completely unnecessary. We know who’s speaking, and we know she’s asking a question because it ends with a fucking question mark.
Skip the fucking ellipsis, or if you must keep it, don’t capitalize “do.”
“‘Afraid so, darling.” Holden’s Dublin brogue was really showing.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FROM DUBLIN?
I hate people who preface actions with "almost" like this. It's padding. Do a search for the word "almost" in your manuscript, and every time you find one, think long and hard about whether it adds anything.
she got out of the car, hood over her head. She stood on the sidewalk with her backpack slung over one arm, and she was holding the door open, looking at her father with slanted eyes.
Chop that last sentence into two. Get rid of awkward past-perfect “was holding.” And for God’s sake, write like some of this matters! Can we get a glare or a smolder or some fury or something? Anything? This girl is lifeless. And not in the way you intend for her to be lifeless.
“By the way, the inside of this piece of shit stinks of you. Do a better job at hiding it.”
Hand to Christ, when I first read this scene, I thought Eva was complaining that her father cut one in the car. It took me a moment to connect this to the remark about the car smelling like booze.
Eva slammed the door, turned around, and never looked back.
This whole chapter could be summed up as "Holden finds out Eva's been lying about how intense and frequent are her nightmares." The issue of how Catharsis might be able to help that is largely brushed over in favor of rehashing how awesome and mysterious is the Catharsis project itself. Emotional connection between the characters is shelved in favor of exposition we're likely to get from future chapters (the book title itself is a spoiler). We don't need that yet. What we need is to care about these people enough to want to continue following them around. At the moment, I actually like Holden and his clunker full of whiskey bottles better than I like our nominal protagonist. That's not a good sign.
Advice: Rewrite. Remove exposition and focus on character development and interaction, particularly with Eva, who honestly has nothing going in her favor right now.
“Three months,” Holden Elliot replied. “Jesus…”
Replied to what? Three months of what? Three months after the dream we just saw? Has she been having this dream for three months?
Eva sat on the edge of her bed and faced the window. The sheets were soaked with the Arctic sweat
No need to capitalize “arctic” in this usage.
that came with the nightmare. It was raining outside, and she heard very faintly the sounds of water drops hitting the roof. The nightmare that had ended was only a prelude to the long, dry opera
I am almost certain this was originally “drama” but that the author thought “opera” was more sophisticated. Operas are traditionally florid and melodramatic and often the characters behave in ways that don’t make a lot of sense so…it works here, I guess. Just weird.
This is the risk of extremely unusual word choices. Unless you use them judiciously, you run the risk of knocking the audience out of their reading headspace and making them consciously aware that they’re reading text. When your audience is already in danger of losing their investment in the story, you don’t want to remind them that there’s other shit they could be doing.
that was her day. Holden was sitting next to her, hands on his knees.
Ah, you crazy kids and your past-progressive tenses. There is nothing, nothing in the world, wrong with just saying “Holden sat next to her.” Any time you can kill a conjugation of “to be,” by all means go for it. It’s not endangered, I promise.
The sound of thunder beyond the walls was delicate, soft.
I am 99% positive that this is a name-drop of the Pink Floyd album The Delicate Sound of Thunder. It’s a very striking image on its own, but it loses something after being popularized by the album.
The dim light from the lamp on Eva’s end table painted the wall with the shadows of her father and herself.
Holy shit. I like this image. That’s actually quite nice. More of this sort of thing, please.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Eva?” Holden asked.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” Eva replied. “It’s not like everything that goes on in my head needs to be known.” Eva brushed her left cheek against her shoulder, and for the first time in the few minutes that she had been up, locked her eyes on the face of her father.
"She" needs to be before "locked" for this to make grammatical sense. Also if that was supposed to be a Dark Tower reference, I'm going to pitch a hissy fit.
Holden’s face was stubbled, rough. His graying hair was uncombed, and was still messy; like Eva, he had just woken up.
These two paragraphs could easily be combine into one, with the description of Holden’s face leading naturally from Eva looking at him. We don’t necessarily need to be told that he’s just woken up; the fact that he’s still rumbled and unshaven is good enough to guess.
“Just because I didn’t ask, it doesn’t mean I don’t care,” Holden said.
“It’s not just that,” Eva said. “Another reason I didn’t tell is because of Catharsis.”
Holden scoffed. “Eve, you know damned well I wouldn’t let you get too deeply involved.”
“You wouldn’t?” Eva asked. “I’m pretty sure that the project’s meant to be hush-hush. Top priority for Prometheus, right?”
Top-secret project, so of course he tells his teenage daughter detailed information about its federal funding.
“Right,” Holden answered. “We’ve already gotten the green light from the FDA, and that was in March. You know how influential the Corporation is here in L.A. All they need to do is call a school, ask for some poor kid’s psych-profile,
"Psych profile" does not need hyphenation.
and provided the parents give consent, they can go ahead with the redesign.”
Wow, this is some awkward exposition. Not only does it contain my least favorite expository transition, the “as you know, Eva” introduction, but it comes in the middle and at the expense of character development. You just went from comforting your daughter after a nightmare to talking about your goddamn FDA approval. Either you are the worst father or you just missed that your suicidal daughter just changed the subject to keep you from pursuing her emotional issues, in which case you’re still the worst father.
I'm trying to grasp exactly what's meant to be happening here. Apparently, Eva's worried that her particular brand of special snowflake cray-cray might make her a prime candidate for the Catharsis treatment, therefore she's been lying about how long she's been having these intense nightmares. I should think basic medical ethics alone would prevent Eva from being eligible for any project on which her father is involved, even if she volunteered for it. Blah-blah-blah, corporations are evil, money talks, blah-blah, handwave the ethics.
Eva hated that term. Redesign. For her, it implied a lack of value. Something she was most certainly guilty of.
It would be really nice if she would expand a little on these feelings. This is honestly the most interesting thoughts she's had so far.
“Once the trials are done, the Corporation’s going to be raking in the dough,” Eva sighed. “No one in that place in Century City really cares about anything big, like ‘benefitting humanity’.”
Lose the scare quotes.
I can't even grapple with the stylistic problems here because the dialogue itself is so blatantly expository. This is not a conversation that real people have; they're just recapping shit for the benefit of the audience. THE CHARACTERS DO NOT KNOW WE'RE HERE, CONNOR.
Holden asked, “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling.” Eva got up off the bed and walked towards the blind. She pushed one down with her index finger, and through the narrow slit, she could see her neighborhood.
Not particularly liking the way these sentences were broken up. This is another one of those spots where I could pass it off as simply not agreeing with a stylistic choice, as there’s nothing technically incorrect about them, but the actions don’t quite flow together; I feel that the action of walking toward the blind and pushing it down with a finger should be combined, and the action of looking through the slit should be its own sentence.
Eva got up off the bed. She walked to window blinds and pushed down a slat with her index finger. Through the narrow slit, she could see her neighborhood.
This was a relatively nice looking house
Should be “nice-looking.” Also, this sentence really is misplaced, and with “neighborhood” above, makes it sounds like the entire neighborhood consists of a single nice-looking house. It'd be better as "Theirs was a relatively nice-looking house."
in the suburb.
I feel this should be plural. I also feel as if I’m nitpicking now. But I’m paid to pick nits.
Emphasis on “relatively”. Her father’s modest pay ensured that, over the past eighteen years, she would receive
Holy verb-tenses, Batman! You used future “would” to describe something that went on in the past? I feel there’s a past-perfect that needs to happen here somewhere: “Her father’s modest pay had ensured that she had received…” Still clunky, but not the grammatical clusterfuck it was.
a good education and live in this relatively nice looking house.
“Nice-looking.” And now “lived.”
It could’ve been worse though; on the way to school, Eva had seen the occasional crack cocaine addict or prostitute in broad daylight.
WHICH WAS IT, A CRACK ADDICT OR A PROSTITUTE?
This is just me, but I love the detail of “in broad daylight,.” as if it’s perfectly acceptable for them to come out in the evening, but being out in broad daylight crosses the line.
“Why me?”
“Klaus Krieger thinks that you’re a viable candidate. He’s under the impression that your psychological profile is stable enough.”
So much for medical ethics.
Krieger was, to Eva, a regular Keyser Soze.
- It’s Keyser Söze. Americans, I know it can be hard to hunt down the alt-key combination that makes all those funky foreign characters but those characters actually mean things and you can’t just leave them out.
- I had to google that name to find out who the hell it was. And you know what? I still don’t know who it is. And I've actually seen that movie. This is why you need to be careful using pop-culture references unless you are writing a very deliberate period piece. Pop-culture, by its very nature, is extremely ephemeral; chances are your reference may be dated by the time your book goes to press. And, again, you run the risk of losing readers who don’t feel like going to Wikipedia every time you mention something.
- Note from the Future: the book compares this same character to Keyser Söze again in an upcoming scene! An entirely different character brings it up! And it still means nothing to me! But the author thought it was so great and relevant that he used it twice! Thanks, Author, for continuing to exclude me from your work!
And also enough to change her gender, apparently.
"To bring apprehension into her" is an extremely awkward phrase.
She was always apprehensive about people, especially ones that she had never met.
This sentence is dumb and unnecessary.
“Do I have a choice in this?” Eva asked.
“Of course you do,” Holden said. He stood up from the bed, and placed his hand on Eva’s shoulder.
No comma needed in the last sentence. I'd boot that "Holden said" and just change "He" to "Holden."
“You shouldn’t worry yourself to death over it. You’ll ruin your day.”
This dialogue should not be two paragraphs.
“I’m not sure if my day’s already ruined or not,” Eva said.
Holden frowned. “It’s been four years since what happened to your mother. You know you’re not alone in this.”
Damn, the exposition keeps getting clunkier and clunkier. “As you know, Eva, it has been four years since your mother died.” People in real life do not feel the need to relay basic information to one another in this way. Find a different way to exposit.
Eva didn’t respond. Every time that her mother was mentioned, she found herself back at Hollenbeck Park, staring shivering at her mother’s corpse as paramedics took it out of the Chevy, which had become a makeshift aquarium. Cheryl Elliot had become a fish, her face and body bloated, drained.
The image of the car becoming an aquarium is good; the image of her mother becoming a fish is not so good (fish, for the record, do not look either bloated or drained in an aquarium). "Bloated" and "drained" are literally antonyms. She can't be both at once.
Also, serious research fail. It takes a corpse about a week to bloat underwater. Otherwise, water--especially cold water, especially is the body itself is protected from insects and predators by oh, let's say, A CAR--can offset decay for hours if not days. If the car had been underwater long enough for the corpse to bloat, why was her daughter--who would have been all of thirteen or fourteen--allowed to be on the scene? If she was in the accident too (as her shivering seems to indicate), why wasn't she in hospital already?
Her eyes were an abyss, staring into Eva’s. She’d never forget it for as long as she lived.
Which is why EMS would have whisked her the fuck out of there!
Eva said, “I know that, Dad.”
It was the City of Angels, but the angels were crying this morning.
Oh for pete’s sake. This sentence is on the verge of collapsing from its own pretentiousness. We know it’s raining, we know we’re in Los Angeles, and this sentence comes out of nowhere because the author felt it was Deep and Meaningful.
The tears were falling hard and fast beyond the blinds. Eva had already shed her tears for the day; she wiped them off in the darkness just as Holden had walked into her room.
This whole paragraph is oddly out of place and I'm not sure how to correct it. Generally my advice for out-of-place sentences that don't have a home is to chop them. Since the paragraph basically exist solely as life support to the original Deep and Meaningful one, I recommend delete with extreme prejudice.
This was the beginning of another day at Los Angeles High.
We'll talk about this more next chapter, but for now, take a shot every time the full name of Eva's school gets dropped for no reason! Two shots when the name changes subtly from the previous mention!
I don't understand why the fact that this is a school day requires such a formal introduction, though.
Another eight hours of fun and adventure, she thought.
After getting dressed and helping herself to a hurried breakfast, Eva found herself standing in front of the mirror of the upstairs bathroom, staring at the strange girl which returned her gaze.
Oh shit. Oh shit. Are we really doing this scene?
Folks, there is no really elegant way to drop in a character’s physical description, but the “looking in the bathroom mirror” method is one of the most painful. And double points off for playing the scene as “who is this strange person in the mirror? Surely it must be a stranger, for it cannot be—oh! It is I! How can this be?” like Bella Fucking Swan in her wedding gown.
You know what would have been a great moment for describing Eva? Have Holden do it back in the bedroom. It would have seemed more normal for a father to brush his daughter’s bright red bangs from her large brown eyes and be concerned about how thin and pale she is, how the circles under her eyes were like canyons. Character description for Eva, character development for Holden. Everybody wins.
It was human, but in a way, not quite.
In what way? Everything in the description that follows sounds very human. If you want to say "she looked human except for the dead look in her eyes." then go ahead and fucking say that. It's cliched as hell but it's better than nothing at all.
The girl facing her had short red hair, which contrasted the porcelain white skin. She was thin, grotesquely so. Eva asked the girl how long it’s been
Should be "it had been."
since she slept well, or eaten a complete meal.
Didn't you just have breakfast? Also, no comma.
She could sense a heartbeat through the tiny, frowning smiley shirt
Oh for fuck's sake. That description is so confusing. Just say she had a fucking frowny-face shirt. We know what the fucking emoticon looks like.
(Incidentally that shirt gets described I think three more times. Same description each time, as if he fears we'll forget it between mentions.)
And again, kill that comma.
she wore. The eyes were massive and brown, and underneath were bags, canyons really.
Note from the Future: her eyebags are compared to canyons again later.
Just looking at this thing, this creature in the mirror,
Spare me.
Eva felt like vomiting into the nearby toilet. She gulped, holding it back.
Eight hours, she thought.
###
Trivia time! Three hashtags in a manuscript is a tradition from the dead language of typesetting. It comes from a time when manuscripts were produced on typewriters and it signals the end of a manuscript. In fact, when I tried to reproduce it in Word just now, Word automatically translated it into a nice, thick, annoying black bar. A space in a manuscript is formally indicated by Enter, Enter, Center, Single Hashtag, Enter, and resuming text. I expect that not long in the future, the hashtag to indicate “THIS SPACE DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK” is going to go the way of the dinosaur as word processing programs are now able to reproduce text as it will appear in the published work.
TL;DR: Connor thinks he’s writing on a typewriter because that shit's retro and cool, and traditional rigid manuscript guidelines grow increasingly obsolete with the widespread accessibility of superior self-publishing technology. Write the MLA and complain!
Holden’s car was a battered relic out of an old detective film from the forties.
Lose "the forties" and just go with "a battered relic from an old detective film." Or even better, just describe the fucking thing without requiring your readers to have seen The Big Sleep.
For a writer, you sure are asking your readers to do a lot of legwork on these descriptions.
and the interior smelled of booze. On the way to L.A. High,
Drink!
Eva had noticed several steaming manhole covers. This didn’t really feel like Los Angeles anymore. It was more like Noir Angeles. The rain was still falling.
Literally none of these sentences have anything to do with one another.
You know what would have been nice? DESCRIPTION. Instead of telling us “it looked like a noir movie” (and thus making the second movie reference in a single paragraph), describe in noir terms: the rain turns everything black-and-white, with high sharp contrast between shadow and light, the steam is rising in gusts, empty mirror-gloss streets. Then, if you absolutely must, compare it to a movie set.
Throughout the ride, nothing was spoken. This had become second nature to them. They got up, got ready, and went their separate ways.
...except we just saw you having a conversation. A kind of important conversation, actually. Please don't contradict things you just showed me.
And you’re not exactly going your separate ways if you’re both in a car together and he’s driving you to school, Girlie-Girl.
The car came to a stop at the main parking lot of the school. Beyond the windshield, Eva could vaguely see students running into the building to escape the rain.
I hate that whole last sentence and I wish I could set fire to it. Can we get some delineation between the figures of the students being vague and Eva's vision being vague?
“I don’t have to go… Do I, Dad?” she asked.
This is one of those moments when a dialogue tag is completely unnecessary. We know who’s speaking, and we know she’s asking a question because it ends with a fucking question mark.
Skip the fucking ellipsis, or if you must keep it, don’t capitalize “do.”
“‘Afraid so, darling.” Holden’s Dublin brogue was really showing.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FROM DUBLIN?
- When your character has an immediately noticeable trait like an accent, mention it as soon as possible. Your reader builds a mental image of a character very quickly and you don’t want to throw in a detail that derails that image; otherwise the reader is apt to get resentful and suspicious. Imagine that instead of simply having an accent, the author chose this moment, several pages after the character’s introduction, to announce “oh yeah, and by the way: Holden’s only two feet tall.”
- Holden’s been talking ever since he was introduced; the very first line of this chapter is his dialogue. There has been ample opportunity to bring up his accent before now.
- I’m not suggesting you write out his accent phonetically—Jesus, no—but if his accent is suddenly more prominent, it would be helpful if his dialogue reflected this. I am dearly hoping that the superfluous apostrophe after the open-quotes was originally an attempt to write “’Fraid so, darling” that was caught by autocorrect.
I hate people who preface actions with "almost" like this. It's padding. Do a search for the word "almost" in your manuscript, and every time you find one, think long and hard about whether it adds anything.
she got out of the car, hood over her head. She stood on the sidewalk with her backpack slung over one arm, and she was holding the door open, looking at her father with slanted eyes.
Chop that last sentence into two. Get rid of awkward past-perfect “was holding.” And for God’s sake, write like some of this matters! Can we get a glare or a smolder or some fury or something? Anything? This girl is lifeless. And not in the way you intend for her to be lifeless.
“By the way, the inside of this piece of shit stinks of you. Do a better job at hiding it.”
Hand to Christ, when I first read this scene, I thought Eva was complaining that her father cut one in the car. It took me a moment to connect this to the remark about the car smelling like booze.
Eva slammed the door, turned around, and never looked back.
This whole chapter could be summed up as "Holden finds out Eva's been lying about how intense and frequent are her nightmares." The issue of how Catharsis might be able to help that is largely brushed over in favor of rehashing how awesome and mysterious is the Catharsis project itself. Emotional connection between the characters is shelved in favor of exposition we're likely to get from future chapters (the book title itself is a spoiler). We don't need that yet. What we need is to care about these people enough to want to continue following them around. At the moment, I actually like Holden and his clunker full of whiskey bottles better than I like our nominal protagonist. That's not a good sign.
Advice: Rewrite. Remove exposition and focus on character development and interaction, particularly with Eva, who honestly has nothing going in her favor right now.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
https://kiwifarms.net/attachments/upload_2015-1-16_18-31-32-png.13271
He looks like he's about to boo hoo in his profile pic.
--
Is his last name really BIBLE? Or does he just call himself that?
He looks like he's about to boo hoo in his profile pic.
--
Is his last name really BIBLE? Or does he just call himself that?
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2013
No, Bible is, as far as we know, his legal last name.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2014
TRUE AND HONEST CONNOR FANS
Be sure to like his page on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorverse
(he only has 8 fans lol)
Be sure to like his page on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorverse
(he only has 8 fans lol)
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- Joined
- Sep 16, 2013
Bible....Church....
There is a connection here, but I wonder what it is? Oh yeah, they're both people with religion-themed last names who write shit and think they're far smarter than they really are.
There is a connection here, but I wonder what it is? Oh yeah, they're both people with religion-themed last names who write shit and think they're far smarter than they really are.
caffeinated_wench
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2013
This is the best fucking thing I've read all day. 10/10, would buy.
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2014
I agree with you about Eva's dad being much more intresting and likable than Eva. We need a story about Holden, the Irish accented Noir character who has to deal with his bratty daughter and booze bottle filled junker.
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2014
I like to think Holden Elliott is the bastard butt baby of @Holden and Elliott Roger
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2014
Say Connor? If you're not going to work, at least do something worth writing about.
You're young, you're technically in college, and you don't pay rent. A lot of people would kill for that kind of freedom, and you're not using it. I honestly can't picture you having fun. I can't imagine what that would even look like, and that suggests you're not even a good slacker. You could at least be getting into some sort of amusing mischief. For example:
You're young, you're technically in college, and you don't pay rent. A lot of people would kill for that kind of freedom, and you're not using it. I honestly can't picture you having fun. I can't imagine what that would even look like, and that suggests you're not even a good slacker. You could at least be getting into some sort of amusing mischief. For example:
- Drunkenly racing stolen shopping carts with your friends.
- Going to shitty house parties and getting kicked out for pissing out a second-story window.
- Smoking a hookah with a dude named "SteveWolf" who won't shut up about Ron Paul.
- Letting someone talk you into going to a Wiccan meetup and having a really awful time.
- Finding your town's last independent record shop and getting into a civil debate about the merits of the Dead Milkmen.
- Building a robot for no reason - here's an easy one that will still impress people because it is a robot.
- At the very least, taking some fun blow-off classes as electives.