Beautiful. Captures the city, its people and the feeling of foreigness. The lvoing desription of the city and its people brings them to life, puts you there.
The consternation over what to do with the melons, the solution, and the ending play perfectly. A foreigner is never unobserved and never not talked about.
This line needs correction: "shovelling rice into their mouths at lightening speed" should use lightning.
And pin yin just doesn't look right to me but I know it is.
Thanks for taking me to a place and a people I have not seen. The journey was worth the time.
Nice story with good twist neatly foreshadowed by the title.
What I find disconcerting is the structure and grammar you use for dialogue. For example:
-Wha?-
Begins Frank.
where I would expect to see; "Wha?" begins Frank.
But, given that, the only other point to makeis the last paragraph which may have too many 'is's in it. Say you took one out of the first line and changed lodged to lodges. Taking the other 'is' out requires a re-write of the sentence.
Given that, I enjoyed the tale and look forward to reading more.
Very nicely done. Admire the concept of a male muse for a female writer though I suspect it might set the women's movement back a few years. 'He's there whenever she needs him' adds a sexual tension to the relationship that intrigues me, me being male and assuming my muse must be female.
Also admire the notebook by the bed, very efficient recognition of when and where inspiration usually hits.
I wonder about the blue, how it felt, what it smelled like, whether there was any sound of movement as she searched her surroundings.
I wonder, too, what 'pointedly' adds to her question.
Anyway, good story. Keep writing.
Well done!
The undertone running through the piece that Bonzo may not be all that his press releases indicate is truly horrific. Phrases such as "that is when J.J. Schmitt knew how to save Bonzo from his foreboding fate" and "we did it!" build an expectation, a conviction the conclusion will contain the standard ugly twist.
Yet, all along, Bonzo is what he is. No twist. Just Bonzo being Bonzo.
Neatly packaged.
Interesting description of modern Tokyo and ex-patriot working conditions. Enjoyed that a lot.
Buzz' character leaves a lot to be desired through most of the story. Okay, it's realistic but he's still hard to root for. In fact, he's so self-centered, so into his own pleasures, the transformation at story's conclusion comes with no set-up. All of a sudden he's a good father? Where'd that come from? The idea of the woman undiscovered for six weeks - how could no one not know? - caused him to turn a new leaf? Needs a bit more description to make that point before showing him talking to the daughter he can put aside when it is inconvenient for him to take interest.
A couple of things about the numbers bother me. Are you certain the shower water was 35 decerees Celsius? And he thought that was cool? If true, remind me not to take a job in Tokyo.
You state Buzz has been in Japan seven years. You state that he met Hiroko after he arrived. So, assuming a whirlwind relationship, and immediate impregnation, how can Ai be seven years old?
You have a smooth story telling style, a knack for description, and a nice understanding of people.
You kept me interested for the whole ride.
Ecllent story. A little more polish and this ought to sell to the better sf magazines.
Twop things I recommend you look at:
First, you wrote: "The rain, the horrid, torrential rain was there from the beginning. It simply would not stop, it never stopped." Yet, describing the rain on the roof, it is always plink-plink-plink. That just doesn't sound correct to me for a torrential rain. Might want to look at the inside of a drum analogy.
Second: This sentence "A little rain, make him, the finest engineer of his day, go mad?" seems to have one too many commas.
Congratulations on a story well written.
Very nice plotting and writing. The idea of the lost index finger for a piano player is portrayed particularly well.
Seb's character is developed nicely throughout, his acclimation to the bullies and his subsequent acclimation to the nerds. What I think might help with this transformation is a description of some action Dr. Allen took to facilitate this change. It certainly did not apply to his father. There is no compassion there at all, which could be because of the pain of perceived loss of his parents interest. Sure, he reasoned it out in his mind but he didn't feel it as he ought, especially as Dr. Allen had been working with him.
Another idea you might want to consider is that while laying in the hospital all those weeks, realizing he would be confined to a wheelchair, how did he picture his life after the hospital? People do that, consider what life is going to be like now that they're different. Thinking of his new life, he would have some idea of what reception he was going to get from friends who never visisted him, bullies who never visisted him. Doesn't change the story. Makes the transition to nerddom easier to understand.
Then, not knowing his age, I wonder about him applying the term psychopath to himself. That's a pretty sophisticated analysis for a boy whose language has been nothing but ordinary to this point. Same question applies to his gazing at his father patronizingly. Those two words seem out of his place with the rest of his speech pattern.
Typos need to be addressed but one in particular spell checker won't tell you about: in the same paragraph as psychopath you have coincidence where you meant to type confidence.
I like everything about this but the opening paragraph. That paragraph almost – but not quite – had me closing the file. That would have been a real shame because you have a good story behind it. My thoughts on the opening paragraph:
As I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at a man’s face.
Very nice opening that immediately establishes the medium, horror.
I jumped up off the dirt floor.
I get this part as a reaction to the situation in the first sentence. Yeah, you’d recognize it was a dirt floor and it adds to the horror. So far, so good.
I was standing in the middle of a wooden staircase without any steps.
This is difficult to picture. Standing in the middle of a wooden staircase creates an image of a such a staircase but the “middle of a staircase” sounds as if you are leaning the language. I know you’re not but that’s what it sounds like. When we add “without any steps” we see what you’re after but, if there are no steps and you have no railing – at least you never indicate there is a railing – then how do you know they are wooden steps? The easiest solution – to me – is to eliminate the adjective wooden. Sentence will still get your message across that there is no way up and out.
Also, it wasn’t just one but two bodies with me.
Now we have to work some more. Bodies? The man’s face you were looking at was attached to a body? Evidently. Wouldn’t we normally say that there were two two people lying there? It just doesn’t sound right to say not just one but two [I]bodies[/I] because bodies lying about are automatically dead bodies. But, you aren’t certain at this point that they are dead. Because you say:.
Both seemed dead.
Now they are bodies.
So, I’d recommend you work on that sentence to tie the man’s face to a person laying on the floor and then: omigod there’s another person laying there as well. And they both seem dead.
Liked this a lot with just a few reservations.
As with us all, there are typos that need attention.
This line is confusing: watch my face in the mirror as the lines draw out, matching stride for stride who I might really be inside. The lines of her face are walking down her image? Who she might be or who she is inside?
I really like the continuous return to her hair being just so. From the outside, people see hair just so and assume that everything on the inside must be just so. For me, the strongest part of the piece.
You'd think that by her college years someone might have talked to her about her obsessive-compulsiiveness, but, lacking that, the character rings true though the guy comes across as pretty stereotypical. Are there such people in real life? Yes. But we have seen them so much, particularly in the movies that he becomes a distraction. As a reader, I want her to slap him silly.
Liked the little boy's impact a lot.
As with us all, there are a couple of typos that need attention.
Relly good story here. Liked the ambiguity in the sexes in the opening. Liked the slow revelation of the relationship. Liked the new bits of information being exposed with between each break.
In the paragraph you talk about altitude, you say "edge" of the world which is not "end" but definitely sets up that paragraph. It was disconcerting though as I stopped and checked that, yes, you had opened with "end."
Thank you for a good read.
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