Subject: Thank you! I'll fix all I can. :) (nm)
Author:
Posted on: 2014-06-15 03:01:00 UTC
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Mission Report/Beta request by
on 2014-06-13 20:32:00 UTC
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Hi guys!
Well, I just got finished with sporking Arrow Through the Heart, my first mission! *happydance* Aaaanyway...
Link to the original story:
http://www.quotev.com/story/4548414/Arrow-Through-the-Heart-Legolas-Love-Story/1/
And here's the link to the mission: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qupb5GnNBU3C6UCAogDjHDmiW8S1qB69kR3uTTk7rkU/edit?pli=1
Also... I need a beta reader, as y'all can probably tell. If you're interested, please comment. Concrit will be applied. :)
Instructions on how exactly to update the wiki with this would be appreciated.
Enjoy! -
On updating the wiki by
on 2014-06-20 20:09:00 UTC
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Exhaustive instructions on how exactly to update the wiki when your mission report is finished may be found on the wiki page about posting new mission reports.
Since your agents don’t have a homepage (yet), where the instructions for “The Complete List of PPC Fiction” say you should link to your agents’ homepage instead of to individual missions, you may link the agents’ names to their respective wiki pages, which will function as an index to the mission reports.
But I don’t think you should do all this right now and draw more public attention to your mission report. Better wait until it is thoroughly beta read, edited and ready for publishing.
HG -
On updating the wiki by
on 2014-06-20 20:09:00 UTC
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Exhaustive instructions on how exactly to update the wiki when your mission report is finished may be found on the wiki page about posting new mission reports.
Since your agents don’t have a homepage (yet), where the instructions for “The Complete List of PPC Fiction” say you should link to your agents’ homepage instead of to individual missions, you may link the agents’ names to their respective wiki pages, which will function as an index to the mission reports.
But I don’t think you should do all this right now and draw more public attention to your mission report. Better wait until it is thoroughly beta read, edited and ready for publishing.
HG -
On the mission by
on 2014-06-19 21:02:00 UTC
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I like this. A lot. Really. (And this is all the praise you will get from me, because I’m really bad at explaining why I love something.) But I have some questions.
They talked for a few more minutes, Enelya’s hair turning bronze for one particularly interesting moment ...
Did I miss where the badfic mentions another hair color, or do you expect that your readers have seen the picture of the main protagonist? How would you describe the color of her hair there? I don’t usually look on the badfic when I read a mission, and your mission should be able to stand alone even when the badfic is deleted.
Silver had no choice but to pull Anna around the corner as Strider carried Enelya into another room.
Is this really what happened? Doesn’t Strider tell in the badfic that he carried Enelya to the bed in the same room where they had talked? This should be the room for which she got the key when she rented it for the night, although she only says that she asked the innkeeper for “a key” and then walked into “a room” which may or may not be associated with said key. Is she not aware how inns work?
When Strider walked back in, ...
Again, is this really what happened? Doesn’t Strider tell that he, after laying Elenya down, “locking the door from the inside, walked out of the room” (how did he manage to do this?) and then into his room?
”Don’t want to wait.”
I get that Silver wants to portal forward in the fic. But why does she carry Anna down the stairs and out into the street after tugging her through the portal? Didn’t they arrive where Silver wanted to go? And then they are suddenly on the market? May I suggest having the heaving and complaining happen on the way from Enalya’s room to Strider’s room, before Strider decides not to open the letter, and then portal to the market? (I’m not sure whether we are allowed to complain that there is a stair involved when the fic didn’t mention a stair, but also didn’t say that Strider’s room and Enalya’s room are on the same floor. Does “rule of funny” take precedence over “the canon tries to help the agents and makes Strider’s room to be close to Enalya’s room if this doesn’t contradict what is said in the badfic"? This may be a question to be asked to more experienced boarders.)
Being used to see quotes from the badfic bolded, I wonder why you put ‘just loud enough for her elf-ears to hear’ into quotation marks and didn’t bold it. Is this because it isn’t a full sentence or paragraph?
Her eyes wide, Anna reached down and
“We’re out of here.”
Is there a word (or more) missing at the end of the first of these lines?
... the author had mixed it up with a feast in the Return of the King ...
Why don’t you tell us the truth: Enelya, who is narrating this part of the fic, had mixed it up with a feast in the Return of the King? (This isn’t a really bad case of author bashing, but to be rather save than sorry it’s preferable to never mention the author at all. It may be ridiculous to hold a Sue or Wraith responsible for everything, including bad spelling and grammar, but this is an established part of the PPC’s general ridiculousness.)
She somehow got a bullseye on one of her first tries ...
Are your agents surprised? Oh well, portaling forward they missed the part in the first chapter where Enelya showed off: One arrow hit the bullseye, the next pierced it through the center and made it shatter into many pieces. Isn’t the real surprise that she becomes clumsy whenever Legolas is in sight, making him believe that he should teach her? “Getting bullseyes on your first practice with bows“, definitely isn’t a charge because Enelya was established to be a good archer long before what your agents call her “first practice”.
– and a dart hit the ‘Sue’s neck.
Is this still the badfic, or did your agents interfere? (I know, but only because I read the badfic, so you may want to make this more clear.)
How did your agents get the charge of having bronze hair? Where they mention Enelya’s hair turning bronze for one particularly interesting moment, Enelya actually narrates that it is bronze coloured, thus causing my confused first question. The joke would work in the second chapter, where Enelya showed that her bronze hair was already braided, but your agents didn’t see this. Charging only based on reading the words is not unheard of; the problem that bothers me here is your agents pretending to have seen something in a place where it didn’t happen.
How did your agents survive this unscathed? In TOS and other early spin-offs, agents may have braved First Person ‘fics without bad consequences (it’s hard to tell, because most of these ‘fics are gone for good and I don’t remember whether there were quotes implying that a ‘fic was written in First Person.) But since Araeph made DoSAT invent the “Me” and “You” crash dummies, it’s no longer feasible to ignore the problem of an agent becoming “I” or “You”. Agent Cadmar can tell you a loooong story about what may happen if your agents enter a First Person fic without a working crash dummy. (Storme Hawk mentioned this already, but he may not have been very clear about it.)
So, this is a good first draft, showing what you can do with this ‘fic and your agents, but some details need more attention before it can be considered to be finished and ready for publishing. You probably knew this when you asked for beta readers.
HG -
Thank you! by
on 2014-06-21 17:34:00 UTC
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Now that I'm back (for a short while) I'll be fixing everything you said -and what others said- and yes, I knew I definitely needed a beta reader. Ahaha.
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On crash dummies and assassinations. by
on 2014-06-21 19:23:00 UTC
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Thinking further, I really like your agents’ reactions to the POV shifts, and the necessity to narrate the crash dummies actions when it adapts to the new POV would probably take away from this. I don’t urge you to rewrite everything with a crash dummy. Considering that every PPC story except TOS is fan fiction for TOS, you may actually claim that, since Jay and Acacia never mentioned a crash dummy or an agent sued by a First Person fic, these fanon things don’t need to exist in your spin-off.
But of course trying to keep all spin-offs consistent is more fun. Maybe you can just add an author’s note at the end, saying that Silver and Anna had to undergo exhaustive examinations by Medical, FicPsych, DoSAT and DMSE&R, but that it is still unknown whether there was something special in this badfic or whether they are generally immune against First Person effects. And then you have a story arc that may span several missions: Will they remember to use the crash dummy to be rather safe than sorry, or will they learn in a hilarious way that they actually aren’t immune?
Killing the ‘Sue is often cathartic, for the agents as well as for their author. But if you don’t feel like writing an extended killing scene, don’t drag it out just to please your beta readers. Your agents are floaters. It may be in character for them to see an assassination as just one of the many different jobs they do, not as an outlet for their anger like we would expect from specialized assassins in the DMS. So there’s no need to make a big fuzz about it in the mission report.
HG -
Re: mission by
on 2014-06-17 07:36:00 UTC
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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.) -
Ooh, I like this. by
on 2014-06-15 05:09:00 UTC
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Unfortunately, I didn't think to take notes, so I can't offer you much concrit, other than that the end felt a bit...rushed. You barely spared a paragraph for the execution and ensuing wrap-up. I mean, it doesn't have to take pages, but it felt too abrupt.
This, however, is what I enjoyed: the opening was fun, and set up your agents well. Also, the mission itself was rather reminiscent of Jay and Acacia, especially the style of badfic chosen, the whole hiding-in-the-bushes-at-the-Council-of-Elrond thing, and them going as Orks, which was appreciated. Finally, I liked everything in there that involved the word 'glowing,' especially the discussion on its potential uses as a curse. I may just have to steal that.
Also, DORK is technically DORKS.
-Aila -
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed! by
on 2014-06-15 17:06:00 UTC
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I'll fix as soon as i stop being lazy ;)
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I'll have a look... by
on 2014-06-14 11:28:00 UTC
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but I'm rather busy atm trying to find somewhere to live next year whilst I'm at Uni.
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Beta Comments, by
on 2014-06-15 01:14:00 UTC
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Firstly, just a little thing that may make it easier, if you change the permission of those who can view it to 'can comment' it'd be easier as then Beta's can comment on the errors directly where they happen in the document.
Anyway, enough of me blabbering on let's get to work.
- "Silver punched a button, and the two agents -- one protesting very loudly -- stepped through into the badfic."
-- I assume it's Anna who's protesting loudly? Yet she's willingly stepping through the portal, I'd maybe have Silveer drag her through the portal, giving Anna a reason to be protesting loudly
-In a sing-song voice, it said: Italics are either Sindarin/Quenya or thoughts. Main Character dash dash dash dash dash dash dash arrow [Picture Here]"
--I'd say you're OK without the it said, whilst attaching the 'In a sing-song voice' to the previous sentence. Also not sure if you need all the dashes, and maybe describe the picture next to the A/N briefly instead of stating 'Picture Here' not 100% sure on that one though.
--This whole fic is in First Person, yet you don't have a crash dummy to stop you're agents being Sued
-- I'd make a comment on 'mellon nin' as Strider calls the Sue, now I'm not 100% sure what it means, but considering that a elvish-english online dictionary told me mellon mean friend and nin meant wet (whether that's accurate I'd leave to Hs), I doubt that that's what the Suethor meant (and if the translation is correct you could get the fic to do something funny like dump a bucket of water on the Sue's head). Oh and something about the soulmate's the Sue mentions as well.
--After mentioning the first A/N at the beginning you then don't mention the others that pop up from time to time to give the link ot a picture of whatever the Sue's just been describing
-- The ending feels a tad rushed, added to that your agents portal to Mirkwood, Anna drops the Sue, Silver reads the chrages then grabs her bow, strings it, nocks an arrow, aims it and fires. And the Sue is doing what exactly? It's not like Anna's holding her because you clearly have her catch the notebook from Silver. I'd agree that that time seems like a good one to get the Sue, but you don't charge for the impossible Orcs (who shouldn't be anywhere near Rivendell).
That's all I can see atm,
Storme Hawk -
Thank you! I'll fix all I can. :) (nm) by
on 2014-06-15 03:01:00 UTC
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Re: Mission Report/Beta request by
on 2014-06-13 22:53:00 UTC
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Silver got an pulsing headache.
as Strider carried Enelya out, to her room. (Just took me several tries to understand that.)
Enelya whistled apparently almost soundlessly. (A bit awkward.) (And I got to the charges before I knew that it had anything to do with the horses and not just quietly whistling a tune.)
I was a little distracted for the rest, but I didn't notice anything glaring. -
Thank you! *Correcting* (nm) by
on 2014-06-13 23:04:00 UTC
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