AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

[Cacatua_Galerita]

Hi @AwkwardMD,

I would appreciate your feedback on my latest story if you have the patience to do so:

https://www.literotica.com/s/ai-era-fusion-tug-clara-solti

I have my own criticisms but I don't want to influence your thoughts by posting them yet.

Alternatively, my previous story (Statuesque) is written in a similar style, so it could be substituted if you don’t feel like reading 9 Lit pages of Sci-Fi. (Although, it’s 9 Lit pages of Romance.

FT Clara Solti is currently rated at 4.36 / 11 but I have a troll that 1-bombs my stories within hours of release, so consider 4.7 / 10 a better indication of its audience rating.

I have no formal training in fiction writing beyond high school English. So, let me know what you like, as well as dislike, about my style as it is all new to me.

Thanks in advance, CG.

 

[AwkwardMD]

@Cacatua_Galerita
Link

Ordinarily, we would not be offering this kind of a review. Your account is new. You have five stories total, including this one. Under different circumstances we would have the kid gloves on, be welcoming you to the site, and generally offering a soft touch. That’s not the plan here, because this story…

…this fucking story…

Oooo. Ooo, this story. Everyone reading this review who hasn’t read it, stop right now. Go read the story. Go and read. Push through until the story sweeps you along.

On the one hand, it’s written in the present tense. If you ask around, if you talk to other writers, and if you search these forums for discussions of present tense, what you will hear is “it’s authentic, it’s immediate, it’s immersive. It allows for a very tight-in and close narrative.” Technically, I don’t disagree with this, but I also feel like almost no stories written in the present tense are trying to do this. It’s not in the DNA of most stories to be immediate, or immersive. Present tense is the default experience of a human being, though, so it gets used a lot by new authors who haven’t spent as much time thinking about things like “How do I tell a story?”

Case in point: Fusion Tug Clara Solti makes the incredible mistake of being in the present tense, while also being third person and omniscient. It’s simply not possible to write a story that is less interested in being authentic, immediate, or immersive. You cannot get any further from a tight, close-in experiential narrative than to have an omniscient narrator, knowing and exposing exactly what everyone in the room is thinking at every moment and at every reveal.

This story has the wildest disparity between creativity and writing that I have ever encountered, and I mean that as both cutting criticism and as unfettered praise. Holy shit, this story is so creative. It’s such good sci-fi, and yet…

In other reviews, I have used a pizza delivery vehicle as a metaphor for the nuts and bolts of writing, and here I’ll extend that to storytelling (as differentiated from the story). You have crafted a lucious, deep dish pizza of a story with perfectly seasoned sauce, a bespoke cheese mix, pepperoni imported from Italy, and the second the delivery driver left your store they ran into a telephone pole and the car exploded. I initially stopped reading the story after about a page or so because I thought I had everything I needed to write the review. You’re new and the narration has flaws, case closed. The review writes itself.

I’m glad I stuck with it. Finesse can be taught. Writing techniques can be learned. What you have, the passion and the creativity, can’t be taught. You’ve got the intangibles in spades.

***

In order to keep things digestible, I’m going to limit the criticisms to two. A couple of things I can point at, and which you should be able to easily turn around and implement in what you create next.

The first, I already alluded to. The omniscience is a function of your insecurity. You’re in the zone, writing Mildred. Mildred is bopping along, doing her doctor thing. Rae walks in, looking like the tall glass of water he is, and we have this:

"Okay. Let's try something," Mildred says, as she gets up to deploy her Pullman bunk.

Rae shuffles his seat slightly back, giving her some room to move -- and himself some room to watch her move -- as she straightens the bedding and retrieves a headband from the side drawer. Surely, she doesn't expect me to masturbate here? He thinks.

You wanted to convey that Mildred is hot, but it’s hard for Mildred to have that opinion about herself and remain a relatable woman so we hop heads to see what Rae thinks about all this. This is you not trusting the reader. Most scenes feature Mildred as our POV character, but whenever Mildred does something you’re not sure the reader will understand, we swap to another character so that character can notice it, on behalf of the reader, and maybe give a little bit of context.

It’s okay to let there be mystery. It’s okay to let some things go unsaid. It’s okay, for example, to let Mildred bend over in front of Rae, and for her to then notice, a few seconds later, that Rae is blushing. All you’ve done is imply that he stared, but that’s enough. That kind of observation is within her power to do, and it tells us the same thing without the need for omniscience.

Readers want to insert themselves into a story. The human brain does not have a media-mode it can turn on for consuming fiction. We are only capable of experiencing things as if they are happening to us, and we are only capable of being one person at a time. If a guy gets kicked in the balls on TV, every man in the room (and a few women) will reflexively cover themselves, tense up, and wince. POV footage of a rollercoaster makes my stomach drop. This basic truth of humans plays out in dozens of ways all around us, and it is the mark of a craftsman to use this to his or her advantage.

***

For the second point, I want to point you to this scene here:

Rae starts his impromptu engineering inspection in the borehole, floating to the aftmost end. The small acceleration provided by the fusion drive makes him fall slowly toward the airlock door that leads to the bridge and machinery rooms.

In this scene Rae pokes around a little bit, finding not very much of note until he realizes that most of the passengers on their ship are dead. Aware that Clara, the onboard AI is watching, Rae has a muted reaction to this discovery. We, the audience, know what it means, but the tone of the moment, in the story, is stifled.

Rae then immediately flags the captain, pulls her aside under the pretext of sex, and tells her about the dead crew. She asks how he knows, and he tells us everything that just happened. At this point, that first scene is completely redundant. This second scene, happening in a blind spot, allows both Rae and Persia to have human reactions to this extremely distressing problem.

We have now arrived at the moment the reader can feel it. This is where you can capitalize on your extremely good story. You could jettison that entire quoted scene above, and then use the follow-up conversation complete with sexual pretext, to give us this same reveal, and it would hit ten times harder.

I preach a lot about efficiency. Lean storytelling. This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that, had I been editing this, I would have encouraged you to cut out entirely.

In one of my stories, I have these two characters who are childhood friends. One of them is gay, and has been crushing on the other one for years. This crush is revealed in a huge fight the two have, but I don’t show that scene. I don’t show the fight. Instead, I show the main character afterwards all bitter and shell-shocked, knowing that she must have come off like a crazy person. She tells her ex-girlfriend about it, lamenting that she’s ruined any chance she ever had of this dream relationship, this fantasy, ever coming true. I can let her wallow in “Oh my god, what have I done?” without this feeling like a retread of the previous scene where she 100% would have been thinking “Oh my god, what am I doing?”

In terms of necessity, this second scene with the ex-girlfriend was essential for other reasons (discussing why these two broke up before the start of the story). Only focusing on the fight after it happened also lets me play with the hazy experience of being so infuriated, so overwhelmed, that she almost couldn’t even remember what she said. Again, this is an inherently human thing. We’ve all gotten into screaming matches where we can’t even remember what we said even five minutes later.

When you don’t trust the reader, you feel compelled to spell out exactly what the fight is about, exactly what gets said, and exactly what everyone thinks about all of this before, during and after. It’s okay to not clarify every moment. It’s okay to let there be mystery. Sometimes, less is more.

***

I hope, at this point, it’s understood that being critical here is a mark of respect. The variety of sexualities! The consent! The hard sci-fi underpinning the ship function, and cyberware, and how all of this operates under (and in service to) late stage capitalism!! The way you wrote AI! Oh my god! Long-time readers of the thread know I am on record as saying “Don’t write AI” because it’s hard to write a perspective so alien to the human experience, but you frigging nailed it! Once I got past the present tense and the omniscience, there was so much to love! The whole crew (and especially Mildred and Sefina) were a joy. You are already creating flawed masterpieces early in your writing career; there is no ceiling for you if you keep at it.

I desperately want to see you stretching your wings and creating more art this elaborate, complex, and well-crafted, for years and years to come, but there is some work to do before you get there. You need to refine your narrative (either present tense + first person OR use past tense) and cultivate a cold-blooded approach to the process of determining which parts of a story are the parts that you need to tell. If it doesn’t need to be there, cut it loose.

Then, once you’ve figured out how to do the bare bones, it gets so much easier to flesh things out.

 

[Cacatua_Galerita]

Thank you @AwkwardMD , your review has provided constructive criticism I can use. I’ll consider you to as a ‘volunteer instructor’ rather than a ‘volunteer critic’ due to the value in your comments.

As I mentioned, I don’t have any formal training in writing fiction. I was indeed reading “How do I tell a story?” type posts in AH when I first chose to write in present tense. I should have investigated further into its appropriate application.

I greatly appreciate your time and feedback, along with that of my volunteer editor, @kenjisato . My original writing goal was to write a “hot” rated story, as a way to thank the community of Lit authors whose works I have enjoyed. I’m not sure how to thank the wider community of editors, beta readers, and reviewers I also discovered here – other than to improve my literary skills.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

@Cacatua_Galerita

I also read your story and I also loved it.

AMD's probably right about the tense and the head-hopping. I do remember a few moments where I stopped and thought, "Oh, yeah, this is all in present tense, weird." Ditto the head-hopping. Neither were that intrusive, but they did make me briefly aware of your story as a story I was reading, as opposed to this immersion in a fascinating other world.

And what a world!

It's funny that you over-explained so much with the characterization, because you were so efficient with your world-building. Look at the opening. You start with this dry, tabular data dump, but nearly every line sets the scene:

• Year commissioned: 2115 Space ships probably have pretty long service lifetimes, but still, we're relatively near-future, nothing too far away. No 41st millennium here.
• Main Drive: 2 x linear fusion-ion engines with beam neutralization Electrical propulsion? This is going to be a pretty hard kind of sci-fi.
• Max acceleration at gross: 1.83 milligravities Okay, so, uh, no dogfights-in-space then.
• Registered Owner: Adew Mining (Cordillera Zaibatsu) Ooh, nice! Cordillera sounds Spanish, Zaibatsu is obviously the Japanese corporate structure, made famous in American sci-fi circles by Gibson. So I'm expecting something gritty and dystopian. Multi-national conglomerates instead of nation-states, late-stage capitalism red in tooth and claw, etc. Plus, Adew Mining? Miners are not sexy or powerful. We're going for some kind of underdog story.
• Location: 1.14 AU, sidereal 5th January, on-plane I guess this isn't really world-building, but it is very cool. You made up an ecliptic coordinate system so intuitive I immediately understood it despite not knowing the term "ecliptic coordinate system" (until I looked it up on wikipedia to write this comment). Wow! Wow!

So I'm all of 53 words into your story at this point and I'm already excited for this dystopian hard sci-fi underdog story from a clearly scientifically literate author.

The same economy carries through the rest of the story. The first sex scene, where Rae is just fascinated by her freckles and the way breasts droop in gravity? Loved the creativity. But also, it's the first mention of "The Heat." You don't say anything more, except to mention it motivated some people to get off the Earth. Of course not. We know about climate change. We get it, and you trust us to get it.

Another example, where you say just enough and trust us to get it: the scene where Clara vents the atmosphere. I'm not sure about the yawning. That to me would be more consistent with changing the gas mix than just depressurizing the space. But the ears popping was a nice hint. And Rae drifting out of place, when you've established him as being quite adroit in low-G, is another hint. I found this all quite well done. I figured out what was going on right as Rae did, and then I looked back up and thought, "Oh! It was right there!" This is the best kind of surprise.

I'm frankly shocked that this story is rated as low as it is. The world-building and the plotting are so, so good. The way you set up The Heat, then the Sunshield, then the plot to destroy it. The oddly fraught composition of the crew, then Rae being superhumanly competent and personable, then Sefina's extra-extensive MMI. You may not have any formal education in storytelling, but you've figured out Chekhov's gun just fine on your own.

Some passages reminded me of The Martian in the way you set up these puzzles and then solve them in perfectly mundane ways. The mention of how the airlocks hold themselves shut against a vacuum, the use of the fire extinguisher first as propulsion and then as pressure. No deus ex machina here, just inventive use of what might reasonably be available. Gorgeous.

I'm following you now. I hope you'll write more sci-fi. You're good at it.

 

[AlinaX]

@Cacatua_Galerita

I have made a few attempts to get into this, and the sci-fi aspects do excite me. The third person present tense, however...

It's imperfectly done, which doesn't help. For example,

Mildred had slept with Zaid on the third night of their burn, but that memory isn't ...

That 'had' doesn't work. Has slept, did sleep or simply slept could work, depending on intended meaning.

I don't mean to nitpick; that's not fair when I've only read a bit of the story. But present tense is tricky enough to write well in first person; in third, it's such an unnatural way of telling the story that it's easy to get wrong.

In this case, my mind keeps wanting to slip into fly-on-the-wall documentary voiceover.

Mildred is not officially a doctor. She completed her training in psychology, but cannot afford to buy the company share

Third person present can work well, but usually for focussed passages where you want the reader to feel disconnected from the narrative.

Also, do watch out for close repetition of words and phrases. It's a minor thing, but distracting.

 

[AwkwardMD]

In a recent review, and in other places in recent discussions around the use of present tense (and, usually, first person) narratives, I’ve argued that most stories aren’t really taking advantage of that. It occurred to me, today, that it might be helpful to provide some examples for comparison to help explain the differences, and so what follows is essentially the same story told three different ways.

The Piper oil field was discovered in the North Sea in 1973. Three years later, the Piper Alpha platform went into service, around the time most of the world was finally recovering from the Arab oil crisis of 1973. The platform was rushed into operation, dragging along a relatively normal amount of “cost cutting” (read: cut corners) solutions to pump crude oil only, but the Piper field also contained natural gas. This was not initially part of the design or need that Piper Alpha was going to fill, but the corporate powers weren’t about to turn a blind eye toward extra profit.

The initial construction put the crew accommodations on the opposite side of the platform from the oil production facilities, but as one can imagine space on a platform like this is at a premium. The refit for natural gas required some significant additions. You pull out the natural gas, store it for a bit, pull out the methane, pull out the propane, separate the water and hydrogen sulfide, and then when you compress what’s left, you can re-insert liquid natural gas into the crude oil pipeline heading toward the mainland at a much higher density. A second, and considerably more elaborate, processing line was crammed in wherever it could fit, without regard to the muster points, control rooms, and crew spaces. Standard design is to have these things away from processing, so that crew are in a position to stop feeding the flow in the event of a spill or (heaven forbid) a fire.

I’m compressing a lot here, so bear with me.

Through what amounts to a failure to implement lock out-tag out equipment control, some pieces of the natural gas process were turned on that should not have been turned on. Piper Alpha lacked a robust, automatic fire safety control system because divers frequently needed to work in the area beneath the platform. It only operated manually, and the control system for this was in close proximity to the natural gas pumping.
The failure occurred at ten o’clock at night, when most of the crew (and by far the most experienced crew) were in the accommodation pod located directly above the source of the explosion. All local drilling and pumping operations were shut off, but because of the way natural gas had been added after the fact a steady flow of natural gas continued to be pumped to the Piper Alpha platform from the nearby Tartan platform. Although the Tartan platform was close enough to see the fire raging on Piper, they were reluctant to shut off the pumping from their end because everyone knew that any loss of pressure in the pipes would shut down all operations for months and nobody on site had the authority to make that call.

165 out of the 226 workers on board perished in a fire that was only able to get as bad as it did through cascading failures in design, function, and safety, in the name of greed. The Piper Alpha disaster was costly on the scale of very bad hurricanes, typhoons, and earthquakes.

The details for this were taken from Wikipedia and the podcast Well There’s Your Problem, episode 42.

***

Still Wakes The Deep is a 2024 PC game by developers The Chinese Room. Set in 1975, it takes place on the fictional Baird D oil platform in the North Sea, crewed entirely by Scottish workers. You play Caz, a Glaswegian who joined the crew on the platform to escape legal trouble after a run-in with his wife’s ex-boyfriend. This attempt to escape repercussions does not work. In the short time that we control Caz before he is fired, we learn that he is an electrician by trade, that the Baird is practically falling apart around him from unsafe corporate mishandling, and that there is a lot of dissent among the crew around the prospect of unionization amid the backdrop of the collapse of the Labour party and the rise of the Conservative party.

Just as he is about to be transported back to the mainland to face sentencing, something goes wrong with the drill. It’s not immediately clear what happened, and what little crew survives this (from the already limited skeleton crew that had been keeping things operating around Christmas time) spends the rest of the runtime sprinting from system to system attempting to fight fires, get the power going again, and keep the platform afloat. Something alive wound its way up the drill shaft and began to spread throughout the ship like a cancer. Any crew that came in contact with it were driven insane and mutated beyond recognition, though they all retained enough of their minds to bark character-appropriate drivel to harass and goad Caz into joining them.

All of their problems worsen over the course of several hours. Despite Caz’ largely successful efforts to fix individual problems the platform is facing (he restarts the generator, he adjusts the tension cables that control platform stability, he flushes the pontoons to improve buoyancy, etc), it’s all for naught. These tasks were supposed to buy time for a rescue, but every time Caz runs through some section of the platform he was in earlier it’s impossible to miss how quickly the organic infection is spreading. Eventually, when there are only two crew members left alive, they start to worry about the chances that a rescue ship might accidentally return some of this organic infection to the mainland. They worry that they’re both already infected and just don’t know it yet. Caz, the last man standing, ignites the leaking main pipe, causing the entire station to explode spectacularly.

***

Underwater is a 2020 sci-fi film about a group of workers operating a drilling facility at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At first it appears that the station is struck by an enormous earthquake, which causes widespread flooding and system malfunction. The main character, Norah, is a mechanical engineer who connects with a few others on their way to escape pods. They arrive just as the captain of the facility has sent the last working pod to the surface.

The group makes their way to the main control room to get a better handle on what still works only to find that the cooling systems for the nuclear reactor keeping the lights on is about to fail. In an attempt to make some distance from this, the captain suggests leaving the main crew facility and attempting to cross the seafloor to get to the apparently-still-functioning drill shaft facilities. Between Norah’s technical expertise and the captain’s authority, their group is able to exit the structure, but the reactor goes critical sooner than expected and they have to jump out of their descent pod long before it actually gets to the ground. The group scatters to avoid debris and reconvenes at one of the tram tunnels, but not before losing one of their number and discovering that something is alive and stalking them in the dark. Much of the tram tunnel is flooded, and they lose another crew member to one of the things that is stalking them.

Much of their journey is measured in meters (descend two hundred meters, cross 40 meters of seabed, come on guys, the thing we’re looking for is only thirty meters ahead), but the inherent hostility of the bottom of the Mariana Trench means they’re having to do all of this in extreme pressure suits and with limited oxygen. Falling debris damages the oxygen recycler of another group member, causing him to slowly suffocate just as the captain is grabbed by one of their pursuers and hauled off into the distance. Cut off from the rest of the group, Norah retreats to the oldest facility (now abandoned), where she is able to fix some of the damage to her own suit and gather her nerves.

She reconnects with the only other walking member of the group, where they drag the third, nearly unconscious member (with the damaged rebreather) to the drill facility only to find that the outside of it is surrounded with a heretofore unknown aquatic species. Vaguely bipedal, predatory, and adapted to the pressure, these creatures are nevertheless in a kind of nesting state…

…because they are attached to a much larger creature. A queen, perhaps, that is several hundred meters in height. After tricking the other two survivors into working escape pods (by hiding the fact that the third pod is non-functional), Norah is able to overload the reactor that powers the drill facility, wiping out the queen and most (if not all) of the aggressive species.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Functionally, these stories could all be summed up by saying something like “We drilled too deep, too quickly,” but from a narrative perspective these stories exist on a spectrum. On the one end, Piper Alpha’s story hinges on the details. A fails, which destroys B and C, which was needed to power D, and the resulting loss of life was tragically preventable. The survivors are all heroes, in every sense of the word, but the only way to tell their story is by answering the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, and the how. In other words, you need details, and you need a lot of them.

SWTD is a psychological horror game that draws on 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure and the 2018 film Annihilation as inspirations. Caz is a defenseless protagonist, meaning he spends no time fighting or slowing enemies down with weapons of any kind. He spends a good half of the runtime fleeing or hiding from the creatures hunting him. However, the other half of the game is spent exploring parts of the ship Caz isn’t familiar with and having their function explained to him so that he can facilitate repairs. These controls are simplified for the sake of a game, but the complexity can only be reduced so much before becoming trivial.

In other words, the tasks Caz performs are important, and their importance is underlined by the complexity. The details are less important here, but not insignificant. Also, the way the tasks cause Caz to traverse the platform back and forth is what exposes him to the secondary problem, the elephant in the room: the organic infection. He’s doing nothing to solve that, and that’s getting worse with every passing minute. This is what allows him to switch gears from “I have to survive long enough for the rescue ship to arrive, so I can get home to my kids” to “I have to stop this now, before the rescue ship arrives. I have to stop it from reaching the mainland. I have to save my kids.”

Underwater, however, draws its inspiration from the 1979 film Alien. The details, the how and the why, almost don’t matter. The camera spends almost no time understanding what Norah does to facilitate the closing of various doors, because what matters is that she gets the door closed before the ocean kills her, or opens it before the ocean kills her. The distance she has to travel is small, but the environment is almost absurdly hostile to human life and the creatures are even worse.

The details are smoothed over because they don’t matter; What matters is the experience. Where Caz is in danger of drowning during much of SWTD, his death underwater would look like most drownings. He’d get tossed about in stormy waters until his muscles cramped and his lungs gave out, which is a far sight less immediate or gruesome than what happens to much of Norah’s survivor party, seven miles under water, with lights flickering everywhere as the power fails and something hunts them.

I am not trying to argue that any of these stories are more or less interesting than any other. The kind of judgement is made by the reader, not us. What we choose, what we can control, are the tools we use to tell these stories.

Piper Alpha’s story is best told in the style of a documentary. Third person omniscient, past tense.

Still Wakes The Deep, if adapted for Literotica, would be best handled in third person limited, past tense. Although parts of the game are quite tense and immediate, there are too many details that play a factor in the important decisions and key moments. A present tense narrative would get bogged down in these moments where a past tense narrative would not. In other words, you could do it, but it would hinder you as much as help.

Underwater is the only one of the three that would benefit from, and is built for, a close-in, intimate, and experiential telling. Done right, this story would be an incredibly gripping read that would suck you along the entire time on sheer adrenaline.

 

[AwkwardMD]

(For the record, I think Underwater is an incredible film. It gets a bad wrap for being a clone of Alien, but I think that the comparison is both unfair and pointless. They're different enough that I would only make the comparison to give someone an idea of what they were in for, and lots of movies take strong inspiration from other works to go on and do new things. Some films are shot-for-shot remakes. Who cares?

The suits are amazing. The practical effects are awesome. The dialog is spot on. It takes things Alien did well, and refines them with better techniques and technology.)