crazyfish

Thanks. I'm really grateful for your insight. This provides a lot of inspiration actually. Thank you very much.

Thanks guys. Yep so the MC was probably let go with a general discharge. That works.

Ok, I have a project in mind, and I'm working on the MC's backstory. His story begins in present day. He served in the US Air Force back in the 1980's. The guy gets embroiled in a sexual relationship with his superior officer and gets nabbed for homosexual misconduct. I'm assuming he'd be discharged dishonorably? Would he be punished? I don't know anything about the Military, and this part of his life is a minor detail. Actually it just to show how much of a heartless guy he is. The officer was very serious about him. But the Relationship was fun for the MC precisely because of the intrigue and tension and suspicion, and when he's caught, he loses interest in the officer. But I wonder how it would work in real life with the dishonorable discharge in your record.

Your narrator has a great voice.

Hao could see ahead in the foyer a glimpse of the ceiling arrayed with glass sand dollars translucent to the night sky. A bronze light fixture on the wall emanated rays that bathed the back of someone crouching to untie shoelaces. The face was to the shadows, and shoulder length hair glanced the cheeks. Pain contracted in Hao’s chest, joy and need warred for supremacy. Still, he lumbered towards the image, holding out for the Ricardo who might have grown out his buzz cut. The face inched upw

Conflict is good, internal and external. Better when the external conflict puts a spotlight on the internal conflict. Best when the conflicts are thematic. You want the story conflicts taken together as a whole to support a thematic statement of your design. Or you get these sorts of rambling stories in which everybody is at war with everybody else, there's chaos everywhere, but there's no real center to guide the story altogether. So while it's good to torture your MC, you need to be careful that you aren't torturing him or her for torturing sake. Their conflicts together should making some argument for/against a theme that resonates throughout the story.

http://youtu.be/TcHYUQmh7jQ Am I being a prude if i find the advert tasteless?

Alex was a half-hour late when he pulled into the visitor parking area of Frank’s apartment. The sycamore shaded over the grainy hood of his car, and he could see through its reticule of leaves winged dots in the sky. A tingle still glowed at the base of his groin, the air soothingly damp down his nape. He wiped down his face and mussed his hair and hoped before the mirrors of his imagination he looked presentable enough. Leaning back against the hood, he called Frank, but not before sneering a

Luke drove to Hao’s place with lazy anticipation. Twilight cast a glare over the windscreen, and in the resulting patina of white, the traffic lights were hard to see. After switchbacks, zigzags and numerous diversions up private driveways later, lively streets became the black roads of bare tar, greenery overtook the sidewalks, pedestrians became rarities, and lazy anticipation roused into irritation. By the time he was cruising Hao’s neighborhood, patience flaked away over the prissy clean st

Oh he's troubled, but he doesn't know it himself. Thanks for reading and commenting.

After one right and two lefts turns for Luke’s house, the day was still an aimless, clear-skied Friday. His house was the flaking green bungalow with a yellow lawn in the cul de sac of unfenced duplexes and green lawns. A neighbor had demanded he clean up the front lawn, screaming something about property values. Luke shrugged it off like he shrugged off demands from men with pencil moustaches. Besides, his tenants, Miranda and Robert did not seem to care about the wretched front lawn or the bac

OMG what the fuck is that? You could totally spin out into the ocean if you are the unfortunate someone who gets rained on suddenly. I can't swim

Luke had rented out the lounge area for receiving guests to Miranda and then later rented the garage begrudgingly to Robert, who was desperate for cheap accommodation on the west side. While Robert was content with the private dark, dank garage, Miranda grumbled about the compact florescent lightening and its unnatural whiteness, the cold tile floors, hemispherical windows that took over an entire wall, looking over the scorched earth lawn outside. Despite her reservations, Luke was deaf to any

I absolutely hate the 110, 5, 10 interchange around Downtown Los Angeles. The engineers must have been stoned when they designed it.

Personally i don't think writers should sweat the description of their first person narrator. I don't care about it if I have good sense of the narrator's sense of self. I don't feel cheated if i don't know what the narrator looks like. All those descriptions on the first page, I promptly forget by page five. Unless it's really remarkable. You know even if you must describe the narrator, there's no need for the mirror. Why should they need a mirror to talk about their bodies? They are talking about their feelings for the entire book. I'm sure they can spare a paragraph to talk about their bodies. The key of course is that these ramblings should be in character, and it would nice if there was a healthy dose of dramatic irony too. How a cocky guy talks about his body will be very different from how an anorexic guy would.

Thanks again.

thanks for reading. I hope the story continues to intrigue.

thank you for reading and commenting. I was afraid it might be too complicated for easy reading. I'm happy something gets through. Yeah Hao channels my love for baroque operas.

Alex’s room was irradiated with the morning light. He woke up with a crick in his neck, and a familiar sinking feeling yawned in him as he pushed to his feet. He had lived twenty-two years within the four walls blue and mauve. The same rug beady underneath his bare feet. The Napoleonic soldiers pieces set in an eternal march over folding table, a few glimmering the same tinned patina, others peeling with paint of primary colors. Over in the oblong nook by the closet, the baseball bat in the sa

Yeah this abuse trope. It's amateurish, and just upsetting. **cough, cough fifty shades of grey** The problem is writers feel stuck with their irredeemable bad-boy hero who should be worthy of love from the love interest. Instead of working on making this hero work slowly to likeability, they whip out abuse for instant sympathy from the reader. "Uh-huh, my mom force-fed me carrots, my uncle, father, brother raped me as a child, that's why I'm being an ass to you. Can you love me now?" That isn't a cool hero, that's one pathetic piece of work. Another cliche. mismatched couples, where one is a saint, the other has some really deep issues that needs fixing. the saint saves the sinner and in the process find true love. Yeah...Beauty and the beast all over again. this stories are easy to write about because the problems come ready made to explore, but they make for boring and unrealistic fiction.

Hao’s house was shaped like a displaced Rubik’s cube—unevenly stacked boxes of viridian glass. Something more traditional looking, perhaps an old Victorian in the West Adams district would have suited him better. Its unshapely design rebelled against Hao’s immigrant notions of fitting in. However, Ricardo overrode his objections. To him the house proclaimed his escape from the midnight lullabies of rogue ice cream trucks, the stucco constructions of bullet holes and piss yellow, and had arrived

I like a bit of tums, muts, umts in my reading.

Have you taken a look at amazon reviews? Goodreads reviews can be worse. You need nerves of steel to be able to process it and keep writing. No wonder a lot of famous authors say they don't read their reviews. They don't need the aggravation from anon person on the internet. There are some who even think, you're supposed be GRATEFUL for the fact someone took time out of their useless day to say your work is shit. At least it's 'useful' feedback that will help you next time. Yeah no, not me. Hell, I think it's your god-given right to punch a wall if someone complained about your too many adverbs. The caveat is, as long as you do it privately. Every author needs their own special private mechanism to vent. You need a little bit of ego to survive and get better, but not too much

but I get the frustration though of not getting feedback. It's like sending words into the void, a very punishing feeling.

the issue of reader feedback is a dicey one. As an author myself, I like to hear from readers. The feeling of interacting with readers is really special. However, I'm very cautious not to let reader excitement be the fuel that drives my writing. I have done my time critiquing and getting critiqued on www.scribophile.com, and I've learned the hard way, not to depend on feedback for emotional satisfaction. For every person that gushes, there are a few more who think your writing is shitty. And because your heart is so much on the reader engagement, it's very easy to let those shitty reviews blind your motivation. Also this is a site geared to readers, not writers. And one has to confront the fact that a lot of what we write, the average reader doesn't find interesting/riveting/engaging to read. Readers might not be able to articulate why your story doesn't move them enough to respond. Since they don't want to offend you, they'll rather say nothing than say something negative or critical. And so I'm inclined to think that if your work is good enough, as in emotional/engaging/hitting the right audience, people will comment. If all the author receives is silence, then the author shouldn't be so saddened by the lack of feedback, as much as they should go back to the drawing board and hone their storytelling skills. Of course, the lack of visibility, not sub-par writing, might be the main culprit to the lack of feedback ... well that's for the author to decide. I suppose there's a catch-22, if readers say nothing, how will the author improve? Personally I think if the author is serious about well-crafted stories, they should ignore for awhile the lack of feedback from a general reader site, and do their time in critique groups. I guarantee you, when you're active in an online peer-critiquing group, you'll get a ton of feedback. Perhaps not the feedback you want. Yeah writing is a lonely hobby. I wouldn't do it for reader love.