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I'm sorry that I was overly forceful over email.

I would like to try and find a way for us to be friends.

The lighter shade of gray was clouds, also the rain was a hint.

Ventilation plotholes are my invention, I think.

The trail of Sue-blood seems like something almost standard in the hallways. Janitor story. I think I'll re-work that part.

The concrit being made of fossilized words, I once read a story where a pair of agents decided to break through the wall into the next RC over to make a mini adoption center. I remember that they could hear the concrit that the wall was made of.

Kitty Eden summed up the Dirk Gently method for me nicely.

I have a feeling that most agents don't notice much of anything in the hallway, except for other agents.

I'll work some more on the characters, or at least Daniel. The woman is supposed to be a bit underdescribed.

I think the last time I tried to read Dirk Gently was when Douglas Adams was still alive. I didn't like it, but I remember so much, like the sofa.

I acted appallingly. I see that now. In trying not to do something rashly and out of anger, I ended up doing something far worse, and for far more callous motives. You may rest assured that I will not do anything like that again.

I looked up Bingle and Finch, but still didn't find their descriptions, except that one of their voice sounds like a cheese grater. The mention of the vending machine is familiar.

I can work out that Finch is a type of machine, and that he hovers. Somehow I mixed up which one was Bingle and which one is Finch. I know you point it out more than enough, so maybe a picture would help.

"‘Oh, dear,’ Bingle commented, taking his hands down. He watched and frowned as Finch fluttered awkwardly through the air, spurted hissing wind from his vents, tapped against a wall and rebounded like it had kicked him. " I feel like this sentence is too long. I do like the imagery, though.

I especially like the succinctness of slow, complaining pinball.

"‘It would be more durable, Finch, you know.’

‘Oh, shut up, Bingle.’ "

I like the play where Bingle seems very irreverent and Finch is fed up with it.

The explanation of how Bingle lost his memory last time and then says, "I think I would remember that," is still pretty funny.

Yeah, I need to rework the ending. I didn't want to leave them in the story, and I didn't want to kill them. I also don't want to recruit them for myself. Miguel was TimeJumper's IRL friend, and it seems wrong for him to be an agent.

I don't want to kill the Sues, but I don't want to recruit them or leave them in the story either. They were going to be sent to the OFU.

I need to rework the ending.

I think also that Kelly needs to snark at them more.

I'm also thinking that Kelly and September need to be split up. They don't have inter-agent conflict either.

I think the fic did give me enough detail to work on with the deduction, maybe not with them arriving. I'll work more to flesh those out.

Hmmm, I think perhaps I'll rely on September's unreliableness to question the lie.

I do need to work on the ending some more, maybe work in the deletion. In the original draft, I had the Sues sent to the OFU. I kinda don't want to leave them in the story, but I'm also not recruiting them for my own use. Miguel was TimeJumper's IRL friend, and it seems uncomfortable that he's an agent.

Hmmm, another intelligent Pokemon. I don't think we've got too many yet.

It's interesting that both agents are pranksters.

Hmmm, the grammar on your first meeting seems pretty good. I noticed a few mistakes. "I only work with people only a mission. "



Lawsuit feels like a better story. "food’s worse that what I had in Tokyo" I thought that agents didn't get paid at all.

I would like to hear a bit about your agents' abilities and how you plan to use them. We get a good demonstration of Shadow. It seems like more than "lol, I don't need a disguise generator." Does Canopus' cell-phone give her any special abilities? I am concerned that her training will just allow her to wail on Sues without being in danger.

In some semblance of order:

-All apartment showers are terrible. It is known.

-I was thinking minor burns on the face, which might be mostly healed by now. The major burns were where her clothing caught fire and her skin was in almost direct contact with the burning material. I should do some more research and see if I can improve this description.

--Also, hair doesn't need to be in direct contact with the flames in order to scorch. Being too close to fire can lose a person their eyebrows without them suffering lasting damage to their skin. That's kind of what I was going for.

-You are right about the hour earlier thing. I think I'll just change it to 10-15 minutes early and have her take a longer shower.

-I'll take classic. Classic is good. This is me trying my hand at the horror/mystery genre. Something like you might find in Supernatural or some Doctor Who.

-You would understand the line from the news if you had been given the Prologue. It involves a man named Samuelson. This does also come into play later.

-Hyphens are hard. I'll have to watch that when I go back to edit.

-"Too much trivia" is a personal failing. I do tend to go on. This is why I need betas; to tell me when I am getting long in the tooth.

-KC does have a tendency to forget that "Then" happens. But she isn't damaged to the point of self-absorption. She was self-absorbed from the start. That's what got her into the accident in the first place. She was driving drunk.


You've given me a lot of really good notes, and a lot of things to think about. I hope you'll have time to go over Chapter 2, as well? If not, no big deal. I appreciate the level of thought and effort that went into what you've already given me.

I will not be officially closing the Concilliary, or participating any further in it.

hS

In no particular order:

-From the way Chapter 1 is written, it seems like KC should be doing everything an hour earlier than normal. She specifically decides to get an early start, and nothing you describe seems like anything she wouldn't do normally. But this seems to drop out later; she says it was 'just like any other morning', even though she is now out at dawn (per the description) instead of an hour after. It's a little thing, I know, but it felt like it was going somewhere... until it didn't.

-It feels like the description of her injuries is inconsistent. It's been months since the crash, but the burns still need gause over them? And yet she hasn't permanently turned the shower down to cooler (possibly this indicates she just has an awful shower). She also doesn't have burns on her face, despite her hair scorching back to something less than shoulder-length.

-I assume the local-news line KC half-hears is relevant in the unwritten portion. It's a fairly classic mode of foreshadowing.

--In fact, 'classic' is a word I'd use to describe the whole piece. A classic nightmare/flashback sequence drifts into a classic sitting-bolt-upright, and then a classic morning montage. You've then got the half-heard news media, the commute during which she sees someone out of place... it all feels like you were deliberately aiming at the feel of a particular genre of movie, and if so, you hit it spot-on.

-Look out for your compound words. I've spotted "work appropriate" (should be 'work-appropriate'), and I'm not flagging up many hyphens on a quick skim of the rest, so I suspect you've missed a few.

-I feel like you sometimes drift into 'too much trivia'. Take a look at this:

KC leaned forward to look up the track for her train. It was just coming around the bend and would reach the station in about a minute. When she turned back, to wait for the train, she felt like someone was watching her. She couldn’t shake the feeling

There's a lot of information in there, but most of it we don't need. What we need to know is that a) the train is coming, and b) KC feels like she's being watched. Something like this: "KC glanced up the track - her train was just coming round the bend - and then turned her attention back to the growing feeling that someone was watching her."

--Actually, your 'she felt like' etc feels... off. It doesn't seem to come from anywhere - it's as if KC just stepped into the next picture in an album. "And this is where I felt like someone was watching me." You've got a few others further up; notably, I don't think she actually walks anywhere in the entire chapter, other than a 'started toward'. (No, I take it back - she 'returns' once.) Still, it feels like... I don't know. Just strange.

--That said, since you're working in third-person limited, this could be a KC trait. It would imply that she's focussing very hard on the Now, to the exclusion of thinking about transitions. She doesn't give off a feeling of changing, because she doesn't want to think about changes - which ties very nicely back to the fire. Checking your second paragraph again, she does seem to be working through frustration at the fact that Then keeps intruding into Now.

-In general, KC comes over as damaged to the point of self-absorption. She's doing her best to pretend the fire never happened - she covers the wounds to keep from feeling them, she cut her hair, she hasn't bought a new car - but along the way she's descended into herself to the point that she doesn't exhibit any emotions at the news, doesn't register the differences in it being an hour earlier, etc etc. She's smothered her feelings about the fire to the point that she's ended up smothering everything else, too.

If that's the sort of thing you're going for, you could definitely heighten it. A simple and sneaky way to do this would be to strip out every emotion, right up until (late in Chapter 2) she sees the stranger again. Cast everything else either as logic, or in the passive voice ("It was as if someone was watching her"). Obviously if you're not aiming at this, then ignore this advice. :)

I'm going to do this one a little differently from the other one I've taken a look at. Mostly because...I have a hard time reading this one.

There are several reasons why:

1) The "Mister X and Mister Y" thing that you've got going on means that, in this short piece, we hear the characters' names about 300 times. When that happens, the names lose all meaning and stop registering as words.

2) You have a tendency to repeat bits three or four times in close proximity. This gets monotonous and bogs down the whole thing.

3) Speaking of monotony, Finch has as many lines featuring the word 'Bloody' as he does without it. I understand wanting your characters to have distinct voices, but this goes a bit far.

All of that together makes this one hard for me to get through. You have taken all of these things, which are not bad in moderation, and used them to an extreme.

So, that's what I've got. I'm sorry I can't get into more specifics about the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLzpXciijjA

~Neshomeh

I guess it's feeling pretty wound-down now, but if you've got something to say, you might want to do it before the discussion is officially closed, assuming that is a thing that's going to happen.

~Neshomeh

So I certainly appreciate all this stuff, don't get me wrong! But I feel it needs more meat to it, y'know? What makes the banter interesting, as you see it? What is it about the fact that it's slice of life that you find interesting, and why is that a good/bad/whatever thing? Why, specifically, was it you liked the amnesia bit? Does it fit with his character or you can relate to it or do you find it funny or someone did someone pay you to say that, et al?
That sort of stuff! A lot of statements and opinions, but it'd be real cool to see sort've where they come from or why you think of them like that, y'know? Not that betaing should be a big bad essay or anything - just, whatever comes to you, y'know?

Just know that we'll save that spot in the bin if you ever feel like stopping by.

-Phobos

Now I just wanna know this, because it's a puzzle.

I'm pretty sure the Board is on US Eastern, because I'm on US Central and it's one hour ahead of me. If the Discord logs are on Central, per Tomash, that puts your comments in Discord at about 2:00 pm EST on the 16th, Alleb having posted at about 1:30 pm EST, and everything starting off with Ix's goodbye message in Discord at about 10:30 am EST (9:30 am CST). I'm informed the 1:30 pm (actually 13:33) timestamp on the screenshots is EST, too, so that still puts everything fairly close together. EST is GMT -5, so for you those times in order would've been 3:30 pm, 6:30 pm, and 7:00 pm, respectively.

It's still possible that something in there is wrong, but I don't think so. Even though the Discord logs only say "Yesterday," that's from the perspective of having been captured and posted on Friday the 17th, so should be Thursday the 16th.

That aside, though: You say none of what was happening with Ix or the Discord influenced your messages to July. I'd find the whole thing less cruel if it were sparked off by concern as opposed to having been stewed over and meditated on for days prior, but okay. In that case, I'd like to restate my requirement for your promise that it won't happen again to anyone else. Going off in the heat of the moment is one thing, but this, according to you, was not that. So, next time you're thinking about doing something similar... don't do it. Take the time to not say cutting, hurtful things instead. I believe you can do that.

~Neshomeh

It's interesting, this, in that you mention that there really doesn't seem to be much 'good' input or criticisms or whatnot within the story. I know a lot of people seem to have that sort of issue - they can't really find anything real big to talk about and saying 'Oh, I liked that bit' feels wrong, to them. I mean, I've had that problem a few times, anyhow.
But in spite of that, there's still insights you've put in that are really useful, you know? You mentioning your interpretation of Bingle's character really is quite useful, because it lets me know that I've been playing him right, making people think about him what they ought to think about him. And if that interpretation was incorrect or off - well, then I'd know I'd buggered, oy?

The fact, too, that you not only mentioned you appreciated the noise descriptions but also why you appreciated them (entertaining, don't get it much, et al) is, too, very helpful, both for the charming swelling noise that is my ego growing slightly larger, and for letting me very specifically know what I did right and how it went right.

So, yeah, in general - thoughts and insights on things are real bloody useful, even if they're not pointing out big criticisms, or any such things. And saying you like things and why you like them is jolly good, too.

(And, you know, the Mr. Handy thing is pretty close. Just imagine all those apparatuses coming out of the descendant of a vending machine from a dark future where nobody really likes vending machines much, except as places to deposit graffiti and take out youthful fury on with a cricket bat.
I certainly need to get onto that description game, anyhow, even if it's only got to be a single added sentence, or such!)



*This is not a sexist term, as betaman is simply short for betamanager, a position all genders can, and, frankly, should strive for.

It's all gotten terribly linear, hasn't it? ^_^

Convoy-S is in sensor range of Tango 3. It can't use its thrusters next turn, but can repair either the wedge or the hyper generator.

Convoys N and C avoided attack. They can maneuver next turn. Be aware that the enemy are aware that the convoy isn't where they thought it was, though they don't know where it is. Their bridge plots are covered in probability cones. :)

Thornbird is coming up behind the enemy, and has two missiles in the air; either of them can reach Tango 1's destination hexes, though neither can reach Tango 3's.

hS