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Maegan Heil's avatar

YOU GUYS!!! THANK YOU soooo much for the helpful feedback. Steve Conway, you too! You guys rock big time. Best writing group ever. I'm so lucky.

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Robb Grindstaff's avatar

Some general thoughts, definitely in the FWIW category. First, I like the prose style. Some of those really long sentences just flow and create an imagery. Maybe be careful about too many of them, or having two or more in a row.

The story itself is vague -- intentionally so -- more about creating imagery and emotion than laying out a narrative. I enjoy stuff like that, and do some of that myself. The story is there, but it's submerged under the prose. I think this can work well in a short story. I'm not sure I'd want to read an entire novel in that style and voice though.

If this is the first chapter of a novel, then that would be my immediate concern. I'm not sure this sets up a story question about a longer narrative arc that would hook me in to continue. It feels almost complete as is.

Some points that might be too vague (at least for me, but I can be dense):

Tallie's age. At first, I was picturing a younger child, then Sid is cracking open a beer and giving her tongue swirlies and playing with her knee. I wasn't sure then -- older, teenager, or is Sid a pedo or is he an 8-year-old playing with dinosaurs who swiped a beer? I'm just not sure. Later, we learn she was old enough to get her learner's permit (and a year late), so she might be 15 or 16 maybe. Felt like her general age bracket needed to be established a little more firmly in the opening paragraph or two. Maybe it was the Tonka trucks and GI Joes that established the image of small children in my head.

I wasn't quite sure when Sid went poof! that he actually disappeared, or just left or what. That eventually becomes clear. And when the ground opened up and swallowed her and Sid was there on a dragon, again I was unsure what was really happening. Since there had been this imagined scene where Sid came with his dragon to rescue her from her suck-ball parents, I immediately assumed this scene was also just in her mind. But as it wraps up, it feels like maybe it was real. I'm unsure.

The bleach line confused me. Not sure what that was referring to, but it seems important to know.

The Z confused me. Who is Z? The two-tongued woman on the dragon with Sid? And the red curls at the end -- is this Margot?

Some little things like that might need to be nailed down a bit more.

But that's all my niggling little things that I didn't get (or at least not the first time I read it, and most readers aren't going to read it three times like we do here). The overall prose voice and the imagination/creativity behind this are really stellar. I've written some of those long, flighty single-sentence paragraphs in my day and I love them and then I wonder if any readers are going to love them like I do and then I say I don't care I'm going to write them anyway just like this comment and I can feel James Joyce looking down and nodding in approval or maybe he's looking up I don't know. ;)

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