Novelty

This was the chapter where Dan bombed davey to radioactive atoms, but it got rewritten to end not with a bang (pun intended) but with a wimper. The dialog with Ithuralde is just classic Dan/Davey, and although I smirked a few times there at what was actually being said, the whole episode felt a bit out of place for me. I wonder why that entire section was included in the first place... it looks like it's there to "pad" the chapter. The PE bit was OK - the usual showcase Davey's life in school sort of thing. Somehow though, there is a subtle difference between this scene and the scenes from the earlier chapters. The entire scene seemed very bland - nothing sticks out in my mind and seems almost forgettable. The last part of the story is what this chapter is predominately about. The tension is being built up as it nears the end of the chapter which I thought was good. It also shows that Dan has been doing heavy duty research, from Venezuela's oilfields to the Chinese/Soviet politiking in the 80s. Somewhere along these 24 chapters, I realised that I am no longer as interested in DOR as I was with DO. While pondering why this is so, the reason I came up with was that the major difference between the two is that in DOR, everthing seems more drawn out. DO was more focused - it was the story of Davey. DOR, although still the story of Davey, has branched out to involve a lot of things on the periphery - events in Europe and Asia and South America which, although are good background infomation, widens the scope of the story to the entire geopolitics of most of the world at that time. That has been a major distraction from the main story of Davey, yet I have no idea how it can be redone since those events impact Davey's life, even if only indirectly.

who decided to explore Uranus...

Well, I did the first few pages of 45 and handed it back to the usual editor. It's hard to edit ghostrider's stuff...

Well, they might not conciously buy into that and all, but the subliminal message is nevertheless still there. Whether they beget offspring or not I'll have no idea (and if they are homosexual, the chances of having kids will be rather slim as well, I'd think, but I digress)

Heh, I'll pass the torch on to ya, Dan. And the review for 23 is up (links are all edited into the first post of this thread) - 2 more to go...

I hate playing catch-up. In Lewis Carroll's (or Professor Charles Dodgson, or whatever the allerged child-molester's name is/was) Through the Looking-glass, the not-so well-known sequel to Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice that one must run as fast as she can just to stay in one spot and to get anywhere else, they must run twice as fast, or something like that*. If that was written in Victorian England, I wonder what Mr. Carroll/Professor Dodgson will write in this day and age. But I digress, this isn't a treatise about the philosophy about running around in life nor a slapdown of poor Charles Dodgson. Why did I waste a whole paragraph and most of this one on something not related to the subject matter? It's call filling up space (although weirdly, the American term "fillibuster" comes to mind) because really I have nothing much to write about this chapter other than the usual. Let's start in the middle then: I liked Davey's interaction with Jenny in this chapter. Jenny has been in Davey's shadow for too long now and in DOR, she's been characterised by a one-pony schtick. It's good to find out that there's some depth to her character after all. Also, I find her attitude very believable for a person her age, and surprisingly, her dialogue is different enough from Davey's to make her stand out. The first time that Pastor Jones spoke with Davey way back in like Chapter 5 or 6, I countered that the conversation didn't seem real because the good ol' Paster (this time around) was speaking with exactly the same sort of phrasing as his son. Not so in this chapter - Paster Jones has grown to be different from Davey in the way he talks, and I have no idea how Dan can inherently plot the dialogue that way. I do think though that Pastor Jones will probably overtake President Reagan as my favourite character in the DOR tale. These two conversations contrast slightly with Dan's protrayal of Davey. At a few points in Davey's diction, I pondered the words that were put into his mouth because it seems more as if Dan was speaking rather than Davey. OK, everyone knows Dan to be the egotistical maniac, but when he starts stealing the thunder from his main character in the story, I begin to wonder if hell has frozen over. Talking about hell, the one scene I'll pick out in this story is the Church sermon. The way the narrative was written almost made me squirm in my seat - I could feel the unpadded pews, experience the temperature of the church as the atmosphere heated from the large number of parishioners in attendence, hear the drone of the speaker going on about something that memory would not retain and experience the entire ambience of the scene. Do those two paragraphs impact the story? Not in the very least. However, the narrative draws in the imagination of the reader and brings them to be with Davey in their thoughts as they read through the two short paragraphs. There is a bonding emphaty with Davey that somehow elevates him to a level that almost makes him seem flesh and blood. And therein shines Dan's brilliance craftmanship. *I actually found the entire book online since the copyright has expired. The actual text is:

The review for Chapter 22 is up, if anyone is interested. And it's a bit harsh than usual, I'm sure.

I know this has been delayed. Life has just been crazy. Unlike Dan, I can't do a review in advance of actually reading the chapter, so I have no "backlog" of reviews to post... but enough of me, let's get to the review of 22. I wish I have good things to say about this chapter, but 1. I'm lazy and 2. The juicy parts are the bits that I'm going to highlight anyways OK, one good thing I liked about the chapter was the use of the word twerp in the narration... but three things in the chapter just didn't do it for me. The first is that in this chapter Dan reverts to writing as Dan and not Davey. What's the difference? It's a bit hard to explain, but after the last few weeks of reading Davey's narration, it was a bit unreal to drop back into reading Dan's writing. At one point in the story I felt like I was reading Dan's blog instead of Do Over Redux and that just broke the illusion I had in believing in the story. The other thing about this chapter that makes me slightly uncomfortable is the fact that underage teenagers were given alcohol, even with the knowledge that they were going to get wasted on the alcohol. Now, I know that the minds of Davey and Sean were adult minds and thus, it can be argued that it's OK for them to drink to excess, but conversely, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that it presents to teenagers that alcohol abuse is acceptable as a remedy for life's heartaches. But that's just me. A group of us has been playing one of those tell a story games where everyone supplies a sentence in the attempt to tell a story. The hardest part of that it seems is that it's hard to tell who's saying what. Likewise, in this chapter, near the end, the conversation between Kevin, Sean and Davey moved in that direction where it was difficult to tell who was saying what. I find it a bit hard to believe that three people were speaking there - the dialogue there seems more like a monologue - i.e. coming from one person's mind (which in this case, it's true, since everything is from Dan's mind). Again that destroyed my suspension of belief and depreciated my enjoyment in the chapter. I do realise it's not easy to write dialogue with distinct personalities, but after all the improvements that Dan has been making over the previous chapters, this little backslide seems to be a telltale sign that something is amiss? Overall the chapter moves the story forward, it develops Kevin quite a bit and gives us great insight about Davey from Sean's perspective. However, the writing leaves a lot to be desired, particularly when compared to some of the gems that Dan has produced in the previous chapters.

Can't wait to not watch Jessica Alba Oh and something for the rest of you guys...

Wow, 0% for 2 categories... here's mine Cultural Creative 88% Postmodernist 56% Romanticist 38% Fundamentalist 38% Modernist 25% Existentialist 25% Materialist 0% Idealist 0%

Wow, lots of reviews here. Do you guys reall need another one from me? Expect the 22 review to be much delayed - life is hell at the moment - but yes, I do have something to say that's slightly different from all this discussion about Sean!

Heh, I'll run a lightsabre through him if I do see him, that arrogant bastard Anyways, Bocian, I think you're missing one key point - motivation on Davey's part. In the first Do Over, there was no motivation to use the knowledge of being where he wasn't suppose to be to get Brian as his (Davey's) boyfriend. With the shooting incident it is clearly stated by Dan that he was manipulating Brian with the infomation he had so that Brian could be, at the very least, "impressed" with him. That is what I'm uncomfortable with. The former was an accident, the latter was a deliberate act. Now I'm not a lawyer, or a philosopher or an ethicist (or whatever they are called), but the premeditated act of deliberately steering Brian's emotions is disturbing to me. Is it wrong, is it right? I have no idea to that question. All I'm saying is that the idea of what Davey did deliberately makes me uncomfortable.

Danopolis is large enough to contain people who aren't slavishly devoted to Dan. Let's see... there's Vic and his Trojan something... then there's Trebs who spends more time in Dom Anon... and of course yours truly who indulge in DD every once in a while. There's nothing wrong with being a social user, the key is not to overindulge!

Sorry for the long wait... but life gets crazy sometimes... and I really need to edit this some more, but since I know there are people asking me for this, here it is. PS. Imagine my new avatar with the hair in spikes and the tips coloured blue

This is harder to write than I thought BTW. I'm dedicating this to lolo vic.