Part One
Note: I score things as though 5 was perfectly neutral. So a 6 isn't a poor grade, it means I overall liked it.
Also Note: I'm not very good at picking out things to praise. Mostly the best sign that something is being done well is that I don't even notice it. Thus, the following is going to sound far more negative than I'd like.
Entry #13: 6/10
• Repetive language within short time spans
• Does a good job of capturing the character's emotions
A Death and a Birth: 1/10
• Having multiple characters' dialogue in the same paragraph + having character's thoughts being formatted the same as speech makes conversations hard to follow
• Narration clumsily switches between omniscient oversight and a single character's POV
• The dedication to using weird and unintuitive numbers like "twenty or so dozens" is ill-advised
Death Seeker: 3/10
• Expositions is bluntly laid out instead of being woven into the story
- Said exposition also offers no contribution to what appears the be the point the of story A.K.A. the Death sequence
• Action sequences are overly rushed
- For example, the part where they grab the pink haired girl from the camp. It was blasted through in five sentences when it felt like it should've been more like 5 paragraphs
• Avoid having multiple character's dialogue in the same paragraph
A Viking Hero: 5/10
• Narration does a decent job of sounding like a child's thoughts
Brush of Death: 4/10
• Does a good job of getting across the feeling of crushing hopelessness
• Purple prose abounds, the story buried under excessive adjectives
• The Reaper Association are rather clunky
• For the teen segments, the fact that the names were so similar left me confused a lot of the time as to who was doing what
Life, For a Life; Soul, for a Soul: 7/10
• Nice flow, though the transition from death to rebirth could've been expanded upon and made smoother
Human: 5/10
• Duct tapes flow together via constant blunt transitional phrases ("But the thing is"/"See, the thing about"/"To elaborate on what I was talking about earlier though")
• Characterization of the narrator remains consistent throughout
Isolation: 3/10
• Splitting ideas up into smaller paragraphs instead of giants walls of text helps increase flow and clarity
• For a story that (I assume) is meant to focus more on exploring Tyler's emotions rather than an outward plot/series of events, there isn't much introspection going on
Relic: 3/10
• Reads less like a poem and more like a handful of paragraphs that had an unfortunate encounter with the Enter key
• That said, some parts do flow quite well
Copper Black: 6/10
• Odd hints to extended context/story outside of this particular story makes it feel like an excerpt rather than a stand-alone short story
• None of the impact lines (single sentence paragraphs) actually have much impact
• The fact that there are two last minute power ups is weird
Descending Raven: 6/10
• Even if it's meant to be a sudden turn of events, the paragraph where the squad is wiped out is too rushed
- There's a fine balance needed to keep things fast paced enough to match the tone of the situation, but measured enough for any of it to actually have an impact. This falls on the too hectic side of things
• The exposition paragraph after Donlan gets trapped in the cave would've been better spread out and woven naturally into the story
She is Pale and Drooping no more: 8/10
• The way dialogue is handled gives me a very Cormac McCarthy feel. Intentional?
• Narration manages to paint a picture without drowning in purple prose or heavy handed adjectives
A Coward Does It With A Kiss: 7/10
• Nice characterization for all the different people
- Appearance descriptions do a good job of getting across the overall feel without getting lost in irrelevant details
• "(don’t you hate people who talk in the third person?)" Ends up being more self sabotage than clever lampshading (I assume the intent was the latter)
• Most of the stuff in brackets is kinda jarring and immersion breaking. First person narration doesn't really need another layer of first person narration on top of it