Subject: Wow, already?
Author:
Posted on: 2011-09-05 18:07:00 UTC

It's good to have another Pern mission done. ^_^ Your writing is good, but I'd like to see more of it in the actual mission. The beginning and end bits are engaging, with fun agent interaction and silly things happening, but the mission body seems basically like chunks of a charge list stuck between chunks of story. There's a lot of humor potential lost there.

I have a few specific quibbles I want to point out:

1. "'And [charge] for misspelling ‘filling’', Grace concluded." —Actually, I think he misspelled "flying." The phrase in the fic is "bronzes, browns, blues and greens fling in the sky."

2. "It should be ‘H’tl’." —It was before, but in my review I advised the author that that is unpronounceable, and he changed it.

3. Not a exactly writing critique, but I disagree that the Brekke/F'nor story has "Rape Is Love" in it, and it gave me such a start that I had to go re-read that first encounter between them. When I read the scene in question, I see Brekke worried that they'll wake up Wirenth and trigger her mating flight, not specifically telling F'nor she doesn't want him. She definitely doesn't seem to think she was raped afterward, even with her Crafter morals.

4. I thought the same thing about the number of fire-lizard eggs being inconsistent at first, but then I looked over the hatching scene again, and there are just four: only Stannor, Mack, Zoey, and Emily Impress (blue, green, green, and brown, respectively). Despite the mention of Lisa/Lesa, she is not actually present and does not get a fire-lizard. (The fact that the event occurs at all remains as ridiculous as ever, though.)

5. I'm positive they have hammocks on Pern, especially in the Southern Continent. Why wouldn't they? They're just made of rope with some wood and metal bits. They do have sheep (ovines), too.

The good things, as I said, were all contained in the portions that took place in the RC. I like Grace poking around with machines that do silly things, and the agents have some good dialogue between them. Try to carry that into the missions, and have some fun with re-writing the fic as the agents actually perceive it rather than just quoting the whole thing and pointing out charges. We get the charge list at the end, so we don't need the whole thing in the mission body anyway. {= )

~Neshomeh

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