Subject: Re: mission
Author:
Posted on: 2014-06-17 07:36:00 UTC

I like the pacing of this mission; a lot of us (myself super-included) have a tendency to get hung up on little details that bog down the narrative. You avoid that, keeping the mission going, and only showing us the major flaws in the badfic. One thing that could maybe use a bit more time (at least some of the time, not always) is the misspelling-induced puns. Some folks here say it's redundant to include both the original line and the description of the unintended effect, but I personally like seeing the original sentence, as it's frequently quite entertaining on its own. But that is a subjective thing on my part.

The pacing furthermore harkens back well to the original series, as well as other details. I like seeing agents sleeping and eating on the job, (and playing board games together!) which is typically not depicted anymore, and which I want to get into the habit of mentioning myself. (It doesn't help that most canons don't have the time frame delineated as well as LotR. Oh well.) I liked reading some agents whose personalities aren't so over-bearing and dramatic that they take over the writing and distract focus away from the mission. You should still develop their personalities over time, of course, but it's good you didn't drop their entire psychologies on us right away.

I was going to say something about how vague the assassination was, since all you did was imply that Silver shot the Sue. But then, just now, I looked back at the badfic/mission title and realized there's only one place the Sue could have been shot. So excellent stealth joke there.

One thing I didn't understand, though, was the "you owe me two dollars" joke, though, and what it had to do with Doctor Who. Also, what happened with the orc that attacked the Sue just before the assassination? I can't tell from the words if the orc or one of the agents darted Enelya. And where did the orc go? It just says, ". . . Anna took care of the orc." Does that mean she treated their wound? Killed them? Just portalled them somewhere?

Oh, and I liked Anna's mini-MST of the summary, too.

I've got a list of mistakes I caught below. First, I wanted to mention that, generally, a story should get betad before it gets posted to the Board. (Don't feel bad; we almost never bring this rule up.) There's a big old list of potential beta readers right here in the community, available on our wiki:
ppc.wikia.com/wiki/PPCBetaReader_Directory
(Not all those names are current users, but you can always just stick to names you recognize. And, of course, you can seek the help of multiple betas for any given story.)

The little errors:
(In the Disclaimer)
Titles of long works (Lord of the Rings) get italicized, while short works ("Arrow Through the Heart") have quotation marks around them. Also, the comma after "Rings" should be changed to a semi-colon, since that's a pair of sentences linked into one. A little way into the story, "Doctor Who" should also be italicized.

". . . and with a very loud 'BEEEEP', the CAD displayed . . ."
The comma should go inside the quotation mark.

". . . with even a lightning shaped mark on her hindquarters."
A hyphen goes between these two words, since a word that's usually a noun is being used as an adverb. (Lightning-shaped. Also, why no My Little Pony joke?

"'Alright, we're portalling ahead . . .'" ("Alright" is technically two words, "all right.")

"Her eyes wide, Anna reached down and"
failed to reach the end of this sentence! Looks like something got deleted here.

". . . a bag of chips, which after an intense game . . ."
A comma goes after "which" here, as it's technically part of "Anna won" at the end of the sentence. (Since it could be rewritten as ". . . which Anna won after an . . .")

"In the morning, well rested and not so eager . . ."
Another hyphen here.

(In the charge list:)
Having both dashes and commas in the same place (--,) is redundant. The dash is enough of a pause that the comma (or any other punctuation) isn't needed.

". . . after using the DORK to become elves . . ."
According to our wiki, this should be "D.O.R.K.S." (The "S" is part of the acronym, so you don't need to remove it to make it singular.)

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