EDIT: I would recommend right-clicking that link and saving it, rather than viewing it in your browser.
Fine besides that sort of thing. I can talk about characters and stuff after I’ve read more.
My gripes with it were mostly in the beginning. I don’t like incomplete sentences, so the last sentence in the first paragraph annoyed me slightly. The lines seemed really repetitive in the second paragraph, mostly due to the string of sentences starting with the same pronoun.
Another thing I noticed was a tendency to use the same word too frequently. Case in point:
It wasn’t usually styled in a braid; usually she just let it fall straight.
The second "usually" could have easily been replaced with another word to cut back on repetition.
Overall, it seems pretty solid to me aside from some flow problems that could easily vanish with a bit of polishing. The only other things I can can think of are 1) that you might want to cut back on your use of real world brand/celebrity names and 2) that you could split some of your paragraphs.
Looks like you need to read my initial post more carefully. ;D
<a href=http://www.bluezeta.com/~tk/ambulance2.pdf>Here</a> is the next chunk. As always criticism is appreciated. There’s a couple of things that it would specifically be very helpful to me to know, as well, but I recommend not looking at these until after you’ve read it:
1) Did you feel like you wanted more hints as to what John’s scheme was in regards to Sarah, or was that good as-is with very little foreshadowing?
2) If you think anything stands out as peculiear, or just generally noticable about the way John observes people, I would love to know what it is.
But I read the first chunk and liked it…can’t really see much wrong with it, but I’m not much of a critique…guy. One bit that I thought was unecessary was where the kid says "hang on", just before the class quiz. It sort of slowed the story down. Besides that, I just want to see where the story goes. And for some reason I’m really interested in why it’s titled ‘Ambulance’.
Also, this reminded me to read another of your stories I had saved – ‘Nobody is Hardcore Anymore’, which I thought was very cool. Is there a chance of you writing more ‘sessions’ to this story?
Yeah, NIHA is definitely going to continue, I’m just not up to it at the moment. It’s very difficult to write. It’ll probably be something I do when I’m "inbetween" other projects.
In regards to John dressing up and all for Sarah, I had no idea what he was doing at first and didn’t even make the link that he would be going back to Sarah so soon. But I think it was a good thing, because that was one part where I actually started thinking ‘what the heck is he doing here?’ and thus was eager to keep reading. Even when I knew that he was heading back to her, I was interested to see exactly what his scheme was, which in the end was cool, especially the "You’re going to inadvertently melt someone" bit. Seemed to work well to me.
As for Johns observations, it’s pretty clear that when he sees a girl, there’s an in depth description about everything he notices about her appearance, but for anyone else, barely anything is mentioned.
One question: is Fallow Street an obscure Weakerthans reference? Because any story can be improved with an obscure Weakerthans reference!
are you sure?
The place I’m hosting it is temporarily down, though.
The place I’m hosting it is temporarily down, though.
No wonder I couldn’t open it.