second draft

[crispy47]

So the other day I once again found myself in Mr Donut, sitting near this girl with a truly great body.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I just say "a truly great body"? I meant "a truly great amount of body odorAnyway

Comments

[milkweeds00]

I agree with Natalie, much better, especially the part where he's too paralyzed to call the woman. That's a great summation of all the other elements of the story.

But I agree too that the end needs to be worked on. The phrase "the sky sent him down as well" doesn't work for me, and overall I'm not sure what you're going for here. The ending doesn't seem to conclude the story as well as the not calling the girl sequence does... maybe that sequence could somehow end the story instead? It'd be difficult to arrange it that way, though...

Actually it felt to me that when he doesn't stop the woman from walking outside and dying he's accepting his fate as a predictor, but in a creepy way. A comment could be made somewhere about how the more he accepted his fate, the more morbid his predictions became; it's interesting that in the beginning he has "positive" predictions like the one about where to invest money at work, but at the end his predictions have to do with death. Maybe the idea of him accepting his destiny and following these predictions makes them all have to do with death for some reason, and he becomes a sort of angel of death or something, and then the moral of the story is to embrace such a blessing is a curse too, or you can't have your cake and eat it too.

It's also not entirely clear that the woman in the cafe does die outside from the beam; I mean, it's deducible, but you could describe everything with more detail and not detract from it. Make it clear and it will be more clearly horrifying that he did nothing, I think, if that's the direction you want to go.

There are also a number of minor grammatical errors that I won't take the time to point out since they're almost all very easy to fix, I'm sure you'll get them in revisions by yourself. But I think a couple more drafts of this and you could send it out to some short fiction magazine if you wanted.

[crispy47]

Hey, thanks for the continuing advice. This wasn't something I was planning to revise a lot, but I think I will now, just because you and Natalie put so much work into it.

The end is residual from the first draft, and I think it made more sense with the 9/11 stuff. Now it just feels kind of flat.

I don't know if there's a moral of the story. I wasn't thinking of one when I wrote it down, anyway.

I have a feeling that you're not reading the end the way I hoped, even in a factual sort of sense. Would you mind spelling out for me what you think happens in the end so I can see how far off I am?

[milkweeds00]

Heya.

So I'm confused by what "He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well," means... is he contemplating suicide? How does that tie in with his predictions? I don't really get why he goes up to the top of the building at all.

But I think I get what happens with the woman in the cafe. He knows that if he looks at her she will die when the i-beam crashes outside. And then without remorse he looks at her, and she does die, along with a lot of other people. That isn't made out clearly, though, whether she does indeed die or not, but the implication is she does.

It's also implied that he doesn't care that his looking at her causes her to die, which seems inappropriately cruel to me. I don't like the character suddenly, if he doesn't care that he is causing the woman's death in a weird way.

[crispy47]

Hey, sorry it took me so long to thank you for this comment. I've been out of town.

Anyway, I'll redo the ending and hopefully it will be a lot more clear. I probably cut out too much exposition in the name of conciseness.