Help please. CASH PRIZE!!!

678 Views 37 Replies 5 Participants Last post by Martinelv, Jun 27, 2005

Martinelv

Discussion Starter · Jun 20, 2005

Bare with me please. I know you?re all bored with my posts, but I need your help. All of your help. From every single one of you.

I?ve recently entered a literary competition, funded by our local arts council, and managed to squeeze my way into the last 200 with my silly Tangle Man story. Now I?ve got to submit a chapter of no more than 3000 words from a novel that I?ve written, and the best three get short-listed to win ?5000, and the winner to get ?20,000 and a foot in the door of the publishing world.

Problem is, I?ve got one completed novel (A Tranquil Breeze) and one unfinished (My House on the Fjord), and I don?t know from which I should submit a chapter, even though I?ve decided on the chapter from each! The first is my real baby, nurtured over many years, and the second is just something I?ve spewed out since I?ve been ill. The problem is that I don?t know which one (or chapter from one) to submit. My heart says ?A Tranquil Breeze?, but I think it might be a little too ?off the wall?, even though I regard it as my finest work. But the other, which was more spontaneous and less provocative, might go down better. My ?House on the Fjord? seems, well, just a little trite to me, but I can?t be sure, because I enjoyed writing it so much. ?A Tranquil Breeze? has been a real slog, They are looking for unpublished writers with ?potential?, and for years I?ve been told that I have this. But now it?s crunch time. I need you all to be honest. Brutally f*****g honest. Please, I need a consensus on which chapter to submit. I?m fed up of people around me telling me how talented I am, which I know is a lie, I?m an average writer at best with a little imagination, so I?m counting on you, my faceless friends, to nudge me in the right direction. You may also notice that the occasional phrase, or sentence, has been stolen from one novel into another?but I?ve been told all authors do this! Please read the whole chapter of both, even if you?ve read them already, as I?ve spent the last week editing them to hell. I'll post them on this thread, so as not to sludge up the rest of the forum. Forgive format, lack of indentations, etc. Bloody Forum. :wink:

Please? If I win, or ever get published, I promise I?ll either donate a portion (probably insignificant!) to DPSelfHelp.Com, or dedicate the book to you all. I mean that sincerely.

Deadline for submission is in exactly a seven days time. So if you could just read the chapters from each, below, and decide for me what I should do, I?ll be eternally grateful. I know it?s selfish of me to ask, what with all your own problems, but this really is make or break for me. If I fail, my only recourse will to become a priest, and you know what?ll happen then!!! If you don?t, check out Revelations in the bible! :twisted:

Sebastian, Terri, Janine, ShyTiger, of all people, tell me what to do!

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sebastian

· #6 · Jun 20, 2005

Just wanted to reply so you didn't think you were posting in a vacuum.

I have yet to read any of what you posted. Over the next two days i'll try to read and form an opinion. The amount of crap i have to do these days is truly remarkable.

Congratulations, by the way, Martin. That's quite the accomplishment. I'll let you know what i think very soon, and i'll be rooting for you to win. (Of course, another part of me will be rooting for you to fail, but that's the sick, twisted side of me that doesn't want to see anyone i know succeeding in places where i'd like to succeed. My id is really a seething mass of jealous hate. Thank God for the Superego!)

But truly, way to go! I look forward to reading it.

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sebastian

· #16 · Jun 23, 2005

Martin: Good Holy Christ, you can actually write! I must say i was blissfully surprised with "A tranquil breeze", although i discovered nary a scent of tranquility in the entire story. You write the kind of stuff i like to read. Phrases like "candyfloss and kittens", "small silver fish skitter across the surface of a stagnant canal"...love the luscious illiteration! And you do it very tastefully. Sometimes people douse their stories in that kind of craziness and they bury themselves in it...the resulting illiterative mess ends up sounding like a watered-down Hallmark sonnet (as if the Hallmark cards could be watered-down to any greater degree...Christ, what do these people have, a team of monkeys pecking away at some ill-conceived rhyming program? Seriously, if you haven't read a Hallmark card lately, check them out. It's like they aren't even trying anymore.)

Loved the metaphors...loved the imagery...i plucked out a couple that i thought deserved specific mention: "ridiculously suburban people-holder"... and it's so true that such a conventional car is so out of sorts, being commandeered by such an unsavory fellow. "Sedated to the verge of extinction"...loved this one as well.

You see, it really is very good. I've just spent the past week writing three essays analyzing the hell out of a plethora of science fiction stories to the point where i don't even know what i believe anymore. I hate the idea of battering your story to death with pedantic commentary. I sometimes listen to myself describing something...the symbology behind it...the allusions it infers...the sensations it elicits from the reader through it's subtle use of imagery...truly, i make half the stuff up, and the other half i'm using words to do the best i can to describe what words really can't describe.

My point is that it's silly to break down a work of art into it's bare essentials. You can't say...or rather, I can't say that this sentence did this for me or that paragraph did that for me. Your writing is beyond the level of being casually critiqued...although no doubt people will try. What i mean by that is that what i look for when i'm reading something is that it spurs my interest, keeps me intrigued by it's flow and style, and instills something deeper in me that i can't put into words, as hard as i might try.

Do I think it could win the competition? Absolutely. I don't know what else is competing but i'd say about 10% of PUBLISHED stories keep my attention and interest like yours did (the figure is much lower for unpublished stories). And if yours falls in that category then, if i were judging, it would most likely slip into the top ten at least.

But then, i'm not judging. And I like that style of writing more than i like what you're writing about...although i do think the story itself is interesting. But the style is what did it for me.

Are you a De Sade fan? I kept expecting Julliette to run amok in the whorehouse, slaughtering innocents for fun and pleasure. You are a strange, disturbed man, Martin. But also remarkably interesting.

I only read Tranquil Breeze. I didn't delve into House on the Fjord just because i noticed you mentioned that you weren't submitting it anyway. I'll definitely read it soon, probably tomorrow, but tonight my eyes feel like they're peeling off or something. I've been staring at a computer screen for about twelve hours straight today.

Anyway, sorry i couldn't post on here sooner but it really didn't seem fair to read this while i was at work or something. It would have been laboured and forced. Anyway, good luck with the competition, and rest assured that i'll read all those other stories you've posted in the last little while as well (although frankly i find it quite reckless that you're posting them all on a public internet forum, but hey, what do i know, i'm a bloody lunatic.)

Good night.

s.

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sebastian

· #19 · Jun 23, 2005

brainsilence02 said:
sebasian said:

My point is that it's silly to break down a work of art into it's bare essentials. You can't say...or rather, I can't say that this sentence did this for me or that paragraph did that for me. Your writing is beyond the level of being casually critiqued...although no doubt people will try. What i mean by that is that what i look for when i'm reading something is that it spurs my interest, keeps me intrigued by it's flow and style, and instills something deeper in me that i can't put into words, as hard as i might try.

Click to expand...

Hmmm.. That went for me eh? Well, you are right. I assuredly can't write like Martin, and maybe I should keep my critique mouth shut in the future and not confuse Martin's gendle behavior upon my critique with an educational conversation. Maybe if I read the "Enchanted Night", I could make critique to it.

Not at all Brainsilence. I didn't mean it like that. What i actually meant to say is that I'm not entirely comfortable doing it. I always think it sounds phoney when i do it. I'd rather just read what i like than explain why i like it because i always feel as though i sound pretentious when i'm explaining why i like it.

Didn't mean that at all, Brainsilence. I shouldn't have included this: although no doubt people will try. My mistake. Your review was excellent.

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sebastian

· #27 · Jun 24, 2005

Martinelv said:
Incidently, I see you've changed your avatar. I can't make it out. It looks like a boil on someone's penis being lanced.

Now that's comedy!

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sebastian

· #31 · Jun 25, 2005

terri* said:
Really? You think boil on the penis is funny? :? Sounds downright painful to me. Ouchy. :shock:

Now terri, how would you know what a boil on the penis feels like? For all you know it's the most pleasurable sensation around.

I must say though, i was rather fond of the avatar. Women with wands have always struck me as a pretty cool concept. I don't know why. Something to do with elves i suppose, like just about everything else in my psychologically repressed sexual fetish repertoire. :roll:

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