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I can say it sure does a good job on vivid mental imagery, though I didn't have the context and had a rather different guess for what sort of torment you were putting a character of yours through.

You can find it here!

So this is a bit of a weird piece. It's meant to be pure concentrated mindshpx, and if you have to puzzle over it for a while before you have the first clue what's going on, that's what I was aiming for :)

For those who'd rather not dive into what might, for all you know, be one of my angstpiles blindly, here's what's going on:

Content warnings for mindshpxery, of course,

My last Permission Attempt got rejected because my writing wasn't good (among other things), so I thought of writing some interludes to hopefully improve my writing. I can't improve without feedback, though, so I want to post my un-canon practice interludes here. Would that be wise?

I recognize the meaning in the context of the time, I just wanted an excuse to waffle about my aesthetic sensibilities.

Some images of other watches around the same time show that this sort of decoration was absolutely the norm, so seeing a watch without it would have been quite shocking even then. H5 took three years to complete, and Harrison tested it personally for another two before handing it over to King George III for further testing - I take your point about confidence, but if you're working that closely with something, you'd normally do something with it. The faces of H4 and H5 show the same dramatic difference.

Coming back to the book itself, I absolutely recommend both this and every other Dava Sobel book. I don't actually own them all, but that's only because I didn't know about her 2016 release until literally today. She tells the story of Gallileo through the letters he received from his daughter, and does Copernicus by sticking an entire play into the middle of her book. She's an absolutely gripping historical pop-sci author.

... and now I'm going to stick in a picture of H3. It's not the prettiest of the sea clocks (that's H1, hands-down), but it's definitely the one that best shows off its workings. And if you stick a chair somewhere on the front, you could go visit the Morlocks with it!

hS

Secondly... is it weird that I don't see that in the H5?

Yes, it's paired down, but... that just doesn't seem sad to me. There's a beauty in austerity and in purely functional design.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer by trade. And the code equivalent of fine engraving and frills adorning everything is... pain. It's "cleverness" and I put cleverness in quotes, because it's cleverness for the sake of being clever, showing off how smart you are for the sake of it.

When I think of beautiful designs, I see designs that are elegant, yes, but utterly workmanlike. They're simple things made out of simple parts that do exactly what you expect and when you take them apart and look inside, you can't help but understand what they do because it's writ plain—as if every part was engraved with a description of its purpose. "I could have made this," you say. But of course, you couldn't. Your design would have been complicated and ugly because it took work and ingenuity to make a design this simple.

When I look at the H5, I do see that hint of sadness, yes, but I also see a man who is confident enough in his craftsmanship to know that it needs no ornamentation.

That doesn't make me right. It probably makes me wrong. But it's my perspective.

(I don't have the time to look at your other stories, sorry - I think Zing has done a great job commenting them up, though.)

You've definitely solved the problem of what the characters look like - a simple 'anthropormorphic' or 'two-legged' has worked wonders, so good job there. (Although as the writer of Agent Mmrrowl, I have to convey his disappointment that there's not going to be an actual crow for him to chase.) I think the characters' motivations come through nice and clear, and chopping the previous Corvus-considered-his-decision back to one sentence worked nicely to preserve the surprise 'twist'. (As you've just demonstrated, one-sentence paragraphs aren't something to be afraid of! In the right place, they're brilliant.)

You've also nicely avoided the 'talking heads' problem; your characters interact with their environment and with each other all the time. I actually can't see any overall issues with the story, just specific mistakes that you'd want to look at. Like, the singular of hooves is hoof. ;) And this paragraph:

“Forgive me, but I object to that,” the Pegasus retorted, shaking his head. He then had a stern look on his face as he spoke. “I fear that you may do something reckless and endanger yourself.”

I think you can probably spot what's tripping me up here, right? 'He then had' makes it sound like the stern look just sort of... happened to Cornelius. How did it get there? I'd probably go with 'A stern look appeared on his face', or 'formed on his face', to keep the flow of time going; but you could also just drop the 'then' entirely. 'He had a stern look on his face when he spoke again', perhaps (or 'When he spoke again/continued, he had a stern look on his face'). There's lots of ways you could do it, but the one you have is pretty clumsy. (I'm guessing you originally wrote '... the Pegasus retorted. He had a stern...', and then edited the headshake in and added the 'then'? Good instincts, but you missed the mark on that one.)

Anyway: very much improved. Nice one.

hS

I don't often talk about non-fiction the way I do fiction, but I have my share of beloved non-fiction books. One of the first I remember reading, and the best-loved, is Longitude, by the incomparable Dava Sobel. I'm on my second copy, and this one is falling apart.

Longitude is the story of John Harrison, the 18th century carpenter's son who became the greatest clockmaker of his age. With no formal training, Harrison invented some of the first precision clocks - and his five Sea Clocks stand preeminent in the history of timekeeping as the very first clocks capable of keeping accurate time on long sea voyages.

At the time, 'clock' meant 'pendulum clock', and it's essentially impossible to keep a pendulum swinging steadily on a swaying ship. Harrison did away with the pendulum entirely, introducing a dazzling array of new devices into his first three sea clocks. They were originally in wooden cases, but I think they're far more beautiful as they are now: uncased, with all their brass workings on display.

H1, H2, and H3 are an ordered progression, an evolution of the sea clock, but H4 is something completely new. Somehow, impossibly, Harrison took all the precision and accuracy of his three great clocks and focussed it down into a slightly outsized pocket watch. H4 still has its metal case, but the sheer understatedness of it is just as impressive as the jewelled cogwork of its predecessors.

All this precision clockmaking was so important because of - well, the title of the book gives it away. If you're out on a sailing ship, it's trivially easy to tell how far north or south you are, by simply looking at the night sky. But the longitude - how far east or west your ship is - can't be determined in the same way. Right down to the 18th Century, ships navigated by dead reckoning, saying 'I think we're going this fast, so we should be about here'. The number of shipwrecks was staggering.

Countries around the world offered prizes for anyone who could find a reliable method of determining longitude at sea. The general approach was to find a way to know the time in two places at once - longitude is closely related to time zones, so if there's one hour difference between your location and your home port, you can easily convert that into distance. John Harrison's clocks were the very first way to carry the time in London with you on voyage, and calculate your longitude by a quick look at the sun.

Harrison earned the longitude prize - £20,000, equivalent to over £2.5 million today. He should have been given the longitude prize - but he wasn't. The reason he wasn't was that the Board tasked with judging the prize was stuffed with astronomers, and they had their own pet methods of calculating longitude. The elegance of watching Jupiter eclipse its moons, or plotting the movement of our moon against the visible stars, was far more exciting (not to mention potentially profitable) to them than some fancy clockwork.

Of course, their methods didn't work - not at sea, on a moving ship. But they didn't let that stop them. Sure, H4 seemed to meet the required standards of accuracy on its trial voyage - but maybe that was just luck. Harrison's watch needed to make a second viyage. And then had to be tested on land by the Astronomer Royal, who just happened to be Harrison's chief nemesis. Oh, and Harrison needed to show that he could duplicate the watch.

That duplicate, made when Harrison was in his seventies, was H5. It was not a precise duplicate, incorporating several new developments, but also displaying the weariness of its creator. Dava Sobel describes it as being made by "a sadder but wiser man", and talks at length about the loss of the ornamentation from H4:

This timekeeper, now known as H-5, has all the internal complexity of H-4 but assumes an austere outward appearance. No frills adorn its dial. The small brass starburst in the center of the face seems somewhat ornamental, like a tiny flower with eight petals. Actually, it’s a knurled knob that pierces the glass cover on the dial; turning it sets the hands without lifting that glass, and so helps keep dust out of the movement.

Harrison perhaps intended the star-flower as a subliminal message. Since it recalls the position and shape of a compass rose, it conjures up that other, more ancient instrument, the magnetic compass, that sailors trusted for so long to find their way.

The backplate of H-5 looks barren and bland compared to the exuberant frippery scrolled over the same part of H-4. Indeed, H-5 is the work of a sadder but wiser man, compelled to do what he had once done willingly, even joyfully.

All of which is just so much words, though moving ones. I recently came across photographs of the two watches, and was viscerally struck by the contrast between their backplates. This is H4:

And this is H5:

I almost recoiled when I saw this. All his life, John Harrison had made beautiful clocks - now, his final creation was... workmanlike. Grim. There was no art any more - just artistry.

And yet... the reason it took me so long to realise that photos must exist of the the watches, that I could see what Sobel described, is that her description and prose was so vivid that I never felt I needed to. I couldn't have told you what the inside of H4 looked like until this last week or two - but I absolutely could have told you how its maker felt about it.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If those thousand words were written by Dava Sobel, it'd have to be some picture.

Hey, Hanafuda.

As someone who's been active on the Discord, I do recognize you, and know you've been pretty active there since joining the PPC. I...would encourage you, and everyone else who's almost exclusively a Discord PPCer, to come over here now and then, though I do understand some people prefer one format over the other. Still, y'know, I'm not going to not encourage the whole community to at least occasionally post in the same place. Heck, maybe RP threads could work as a draw--last I checked, there were 2-3 Discord RP channels, with a good amount of activity, and we've had a ton of RPs on the Board over the years. (They're also neat because I'm most cases you don't need Permission to join!)

Anyway. Slight tangent aside...Silv is right. This is really (becoming) much more of a beta situation. And that's perfectly fine! You're allowed, even encouraged, to ask for Permission piece betas! It just normally...comes with that phrasing, or switches to it.

At any rate: hS also makes some good points. It looks like you've deleted the first doc or restricted access, so I have no idea what the edited version looked/looks like, but I did glance at the original yesterday. I also liked the Corvus-Cornelius dynamic; it got perhaps a little less clear toward the end, but I remember laughing a bit near the beginning.

He's also right about SPaG: your spelling is great--if there were any typos, they didn't jump out at me in any of your pieces, though I admittedly go over pieces much more thoroughly when my Hat (or just beta cap) is on versus when it's off. Your punctuation, on the other hand, needs work when dialogue is involved. This is especially apparent in your narrative Xmas piece. What you want is one punctuation mark inside the closing quotation mark; what you have in many places is either a punctuation mark outside the closing quotation mark or one inside and a different one outside.

(Some quick examples for clarity:

"Really, it's no trouble!", he said. <-is wrong.

"Really, it's no trouble!" he said. <-is correct.

"Really, it's no trouble," he said. <-is also correct.

"Really, it's no trouble", he said. <-is wrong.)

This rule holds true even if what's inside the quotation marks is written rather than spoken (although it could also be formatted as italics with no quotation marks, to symbolize writing).

What else did I want to say...ah. A couple of things.

Firstly, a little bit more on the second snippets you provided. The letter works nicely; it's a bit untraditional as a piece on its own, though, to be fair, it both really does work to show character and writing ability (and you've also provided dialogue+narration style pieces, so we aren't left wondering if you can do that as well) and seems to be a kind of extra for the second snippet. Nicely done there.

For the second snippet...well, I've mentioned the punctuation already. Apart from that, I think the story flow is reasonably good, but there's something I can't put my finger on that could be improved (which I know is pretty unhelpful. Sorry! Like I either said or implied earlier, I've done a quick read rather than a very thorough one in this case. Someone doing a proper beta job could tell you more). It might be something in the wording around introducing Vanille...? Not sure.

Which brings me to: for a Permission piece, which I'm assuming you mean this to be...I'm not saying using other characters is forbidden, but I think I might prefer a piece where Corvus is a bit more prominent if you're going with him as one of your Permission agents. As it is, with only this piece to go on we don't have a clue how he knows Gizmo, or even if he does; I didn't catch this at first because I remember seeing them interacting in RP format, but with only this piece to go on? The obvious implication is that they know each other well enough for this to happen, but that could mean anything from "I'm your best friend and found your Santa letter and decided to do something to make you happy because I don't want you to feel so homesick" to "I'm an acquaintance who stumbled upon your letter and decided to play Secret Santa on a whim."

But yeah. Put it this way: as a Permission piece, if your agents are Corvus and Cornelius, I'd advise using something where one of them appears more than just showing up at the end. You're trying to showcase the two of them; any other characters are making cameos/appearing as a bonus. These two should be the stars of these pieces.

As a regular interlude, especially if you've already put up something about Gizmo and Corvus or will soon after, you've got something solid. Add a little betaing and it'll work great.

One final thing: hS has another good point, and I want to state it a little more clearly. While we aren't going to pitch a fit if you go a little off book with your request (see: I'd be okay with a second Permission piece that's missing one of the agents, so long as the one who is there is very present), you do need to provide more components. Specifically, bios for your agents and a badfic to take on, unless they aren't in an Action department. hS' comments are actually a perfect illustration of one of the reasons why bios are so important: a reader who has never encountered your characters before has no way of knowing how and why agents identified as a crow and a Pegasus have hands! With a physical description and a continuum of origin, that confusion is eliminated. Personally, I don't think I've seen Cornelius before, so no clue there; Corvus I believe is from the same place as Gizmo, which I remember as being either Kingdom Hearts or a related canon? So he's a humanoid crow like Gizmo is a humanoid macaw?

That's one example, but bios are helpful in a lot of ways. Essentially, they tell us who your agents are, what they're meant to be like, where they're from, and what department they're in (can't remember if that was present in the first doc, though I do remember they were getting missions and weren't Floaters--possibly DMS, since they were going to assist on a mission with a Sue?) They're also helpful for gauging if your characters are well-rounded or have anything to them that really won't fit with the PPC, as well as how well your writing of them matches up to how you intend them to be (which can shift! But it's nice to see if there's an intentions vs reality gap, so we can help you sort that out).

Essentially: it's not a bad beginning, Fuda, but this is an incomplete Permission request. My recommendation is to take some time to put together the bios and find a badfic you want to mission (assuming your intention is to write missions), and write or choose a second piece that showcases one or both of your Permission agents more. (You can change which ones you're using in your request, by the way, though you do have a pretty nice dynamic going with Corvus and Cornelius. I just don't want you to think that you're locked into using them.) Once you have that, and/or in the process, get a beta or two via Discord, Board, or both, and then put it all up together as a Permission request (don't forget to acknowledge your betas!) (Also, a note on betas: they're encouraged even for Permission requests--especially for them!--because when writing missions and interludes, ideally you'll be working with betas. Betas are great: they help you polish your writing and your stories, and sometimes point out things you don't see on your own that spark amazing changes. Using a beta or several on a Permission request is both good in general and shows us that you can work with them and take advice/concrit. Also, depending on who they are, they may have already gotten Permission or seen/betaed successful requests, so...useful resource!

(You may have already heard this; I'm including it both in case you haven't/as a reminder, and for anyone else who might be reading this and wondering why we promote using betas for Permission requests.)

And I think that's it. Long, I know; hopefully you find it helpful.

Keep going, Hanafuda. You're very close; take a bit of time to put together a full, polished request, and it looks like you'll have it!

~Z

Maybe you should... wait a bit? It's not particularly, uh, expected, for someone to essentially ask for Permission twice in quick succession. The PGs have lives too, and you can't really expect for them to set aside time for you. It's the same reason why the prompts are only supposed to be 400-800 words, and why the bios are important: it gives the PGs enough information to tell if you understand how to write well, and that your characters are good, without them having to go through too much.

If you were going to post in quick succession like this, then maybe a beta is what you should have asked for, rather then going straight for permission.

Here’s the edited version, as you requested. Also, you won’t mind if I ask that you review these two Christmas snippets, will you?

Thanks for the tips, by the way! Happy Valentine's Day!

Corolla + Multiverse Theory diagrams; I am all over this.

hS

A quick search of the Board confirms my impression that we haven't really heard much out of you here - actually, so far as I can tell this is your first time posting since we moved to the New Board - so are you just coming back, or have you been active on the Discord? Either way, hi!

So, first and foremost, as Thoth and Iximaz mentioned to you back in - what is that - July, we PGs don't like to hand out permission to write to people we don't know. So while someone who knows you on the Discord might be able to do so, I definitely can't.

Secondly, if you check out the FAQ on permission, you'll see that they're probably not going to do so anyway. We're not ruler-straight legalists, so we're not going to say 'your request didn't precisely match our expectations, Permission Denied', but the What To Include section is there for a reason, and that reason is to help us see what we're getting from you. Given that your attempt consists of all of one story, it's not likely to happen.

So with that out of the way, what can I say about your story?

-First up, Corvus and Cornelius make a nice pair. 'Old and wise vs. young and angry' is a fairly classic dynamic, but it's classic for a reason, and the reason is that it works.

-That said, I have no idea what they are. You refer to them consistently as a crow and a pegasus - but you also give them both hands. Then you have that odd instance of 'the edgy bird' in the last line, which suggests you want to make him Super Edgy, but couldn't think of a way to do so and just told us he was. Show, Don't Tell is standard advice for a reason, too. :) (And personally, Super Edgy isn't something I want to see in a PPC agent anyway.)

-I'm not sure whether the plot of your piece works or not. Does Corvus want to take the mission and is actually dissuaded by Cornelius, or is Corvus attempting to manipulate Cornelius into doing the work? Neither seems to entirely fit - Corvus straight-up says that he'd rather play games, while Cornelius says from the beginning that he wants to do it. I don't get a feel for your characters' motivations, which - given that this is supposed to be showing that you can write them - isn't a great sign. (That paragraph where Corvus straight up tells us his thought processes is quite clumsy, too.)

-Your spelling is good, which is great; your punctuation and sentence structure could use some work. For the former, I'm sure you can see the issue with “I could do it” was the crow’s answer., so I won't belabour it. For the latter: you've gotten into the habit of run-on sentences. I'll point you at your last paragraph:

“Okay, now for some more online Smash,” the edgy bird said before the console went [BEEEEEP], making him groan in frustration as he held his hands over his face and looked up, yelling “GODDAMNIT!”.

The run-on makes us have to rush through this sequence of events, tripping over ourselves to keep up. There's six things happening in that sentence, and you've rammed them all right up against each other. As a consequence, you've lost the space to actually immerse us in the moment and Show (Not Tell) us how Corvus is feeling. Check out this rewrite, which for the sake of consistently will assume that Corvus is a crow with (somehow) hands. (Honestly it would be more interesting to imagine him hopping onto the console and pecking at the controls, but you wrote it...)

Corvus waited until the Pegasus was well out of sight, then smirked and rubbed his hands together. "Okay, now for some more online Smash." He swung back to the console, hands poised, and-

[BEEP!]

The crow groaned and buried his face in his hands as the mission report appeared on his screen, but the words weren't going to go away. "Goddamnit," he muttered, looking up and fixing the screen with his best glare. "Goddamnit!"

See how much more you can do when you don't rush through it? Now, if you did this to every sentence of a story written in the style of your original paragraph, you'd end up with something stupidly long, but the solution isn't to rush through the events: it's to pick and choose which events you want to write. Check out this recent mission of mine, where I gloss over a long hike as 'they walked down the inexplicably long path', but give full detail on the conversation that happens towards the end. Choose what you want to focus on, and ruthlessly prune out the things you don't.

-Finally, while this piece isn't much of an example, your understanding of PPC concepts seems to be okay. I've played a lot with agents being seconded to other departments, and you don't say anything which suggests you don't understand what's going on. Cornelius does, with his 'guide the Floater' comment, but I chalk that up to personality and character voice.

Ultimately, I think this piece is right on the borderline. If I knew who you were, and if you'd included the rest of the request, and assuming it was of a similar style and quality, I'd probably go for provisionally granting permission, on the condition that you rewrote this piece to address the comments I've made.

hS

Here’s my Permission attempt.

Been wanting to post this for a long time. I will appreciate your input on it.

Seriously, it sounds like something I want to read. For now, though, I'm just happily watching chapter announcements go up. Nice and exciting :)

~Z

Yes, I'm on a roll. I'm pretty sure Doc is going to go insane with my continuous requests of betaing...

Nikki is dragged into her first dogfight, Sergio and Ami track down a certain adorable blue-haired techie, and the mystery of what happened to the entire multiverse is finally solved. However, there seems to be danger looming over the horizon.

https://rc1587.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/the-world-without-authors-03/

Ah, sorry about that. I fixed what you mentioned, and I'll be picking through it again just in case. I thought I'd gotten better with punctuation, but it looks like I'll still have to keep an eye out for that.

“Clearing the Air”
I’m glad the agents finally got this out of the way! It sounds like things only would have gotten worse for Liz if she didn’t discover her perception was being affected, so it’s good that Avery realized what was happening early enough for Liz to start working on it. And yes, mature conversations are the way to go!

It looks like you need to work on punctuation within quotations a bit. Any time we’ve got a dialogue tag like “the character said” following a line in quotations, that tag gets treated as part of the same sentence. So the dialogue part should end in a comma rather than a period. For example, in the line:

“’I’ll get over myself eventually.’ She immediately said . . .”

. . . The period after “eventually” should be a comma, and “she” should get a lowercase “s.” So it would look like:

“’I’ll get over myself eventually,’ she immediately said . . .”

Here are more spots where I saw the same thing in “Clearing the Air”:

“’Huh.’ Liz said, looking puzzled, then oddly relieved.’

“’I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.’ Avery apologized, biting their lip.”

“’It’ll be fine.’ Liz repeated. ‘Now that I’m aware of it, I’ll be able to recognize when my brain is being unreasonable. Even with a perception filter.’ She added, when Avery looked . . .”

“’Seems like the natural thing to do.’ Liz said, shrugging . . .”

“Homesick”
I won’t have much in the way of review for this, since it’s a roleplay, but I still like the presentation of a quiet moment between folks who aren’t even close. It feels nice and calm.

I’m also amused by the little gag with the capital-B “Bite!”

—doctorlit used Read! It’s super-effective!