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The song of the ship
How It Rates
Description
Two ships with two songs, each different and each subtly wrong.
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Comments
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
In the beginning the characters name was mentioned often, making the fist part of the story a little bumpy to start. But then it really took off. Great story!
Liked the overall story.
I liked the 1984-spaceship-theme. You could have explored that more, I think.
It's got some plot holes. Being off-camera will get you tortured to death while within a small spaceship, but soon as you are out of the ship, you can do what you want?
Loved the song idea.
Dialogue and the pip-pip-old chap english officer linguistcs did not really take off.
Everything she experiences in the ship is some sort of illusion brought on by the alien, right? So the english stud-muffins and everything else is tailored to lure her and entice her. Could have come across clearer.
Nicely done. Seems you have a lot of ideas here that all could get developed, and you write really well.
I like the main character, the idea of the ship song, and the constant monitoring. Makes me wonder who's doing the monitoring and why. Keep going. This is a story that needs more than 4000 words to tell all of it, I think.
For some reason the word 'whilst' throws me off. Seems like an anachronism in a futuristic world, as does the Officer's lingo.
Housekeeping: 1st page 5th paragraph "travelling between the bases the scattered the star system" Did you mean "traveling between the bases scattered across the star system"? Also, you use 'intermittently' when I think you meant 'intimately'. 2nd page, next to last paragraph "arrive their clean" should be "arrive there clean". Watch out for -ly words, try to use a more descriptive action verb instead.
Well done, thanks for posting this!
Thank you very much for your feedback. That housekeeping is exactly why I need to get people to proof read my stuff as a matter of course, I'm rubbish at picking up errors like that.
I've had good results with this site, doesn't catch homonyms but does a good job otherwise.
http://www.autocrit.com/wizardformpage.php
Keep writing!!
ARGH! I really liked your story but that ending left me hanging. It needs just a little more to finish things out and let the reader calm down a bit. Where it ends now, you cut off just at the climax of events and the story just drops.
Still, Good Job!
:D :D that's a really good reaction, thank you. Yeah, I was annoyed that I didn't have time to go into enough detail in the ending either. Glad you liked it though.
**SPOILERS**
I'm a big fan of this genre, so I enjoyed reading this.
Here's what I liked:
It was an easy read.
The concepts of having to be watched all the time, and how everything is "your fault"...even if it's not. That the dystopia's reach extends out onto long space voyages is truly frightening.
I love the nightmare quality of the ship--everything's just a little off, and you don't find out why till the end.
A happy ending (thank you!). According to B-movie maestro Roger Corman, when your monster is dead, your movie/story is over, and you shouldn't waste time writing beyond that--and that's pretty much true here. I like it.
Here's what I think can be improved:
I noticed a few changes in tense. Flip-flopping between past and present tense within the same paragraph, etc. Some minor editing will hammer those away.
I don't think it's adequately explained why Agatha is called to assist with the rescue. I mean, the Fortitude certainly had it's own engineers at one time, right? I think the reader needs to understand why she's going onto that ship--and also why it would only be her. If the Fortitude is damaged so badly, why only send one person? I suppose this can be explained away by assuming that whoever sent her knew what was wrong with the ship. Though, as written, I don't think we have enough to make this assumption. Are they truly just sacrificing her so they can see what's going on? I personally think it's important for us to understand these aspects better, otherwise the story just seems like a setup.
I think the song of the ship concept needs to be reinforced on the Fortitude. This isn't her ship...but something is wrong.
Storywise, the ending mostly works, but I think it suffers because you are forced to resort to simply telling us what her computer had told her (it's not entirely clear what caused her toolbox to wait so long to remove the creature--I'm guessing some threshold had been reached?).
Not that you need to give the toolbox a personality, but you might considering just presenting the error messages straight--as if the toolbox is talking to her, letting her know just how wrong things are.
The last sentence: "The creature didn't feel her go." is confusing and out-of-place because suddenly we've jumped out of Agatha's POV, and are now commenting on things from the creature's perspective. I'd take this out. As a reader, what's important to me is that Agatha survived (yay!).
In some ways this feels like two stories. The first part, where she wakes up and we get the awesome details about the cameras, and the second part on the Fortitude. From a story perspective, the dystopian elements feel tacked on because they don't really explain anything. I feel most of the intro is necessary to establish the feeling on the ship of not being watched. I'd suggest working this into the ending--i.e. now that she's back on her own ship she feels safe again under the watchful eye of the cameras. Anyway, something to think about. Your idea about the cameras is strong, but it does feel a little extraneous if it doesn't have any closure. You hit the cameras hard in the beginning, but they aren't mentioned in the end--even though she'll be dead when she gets back if they're not working.
Thanks for sharing. I hope this feedback is useful.
I really liked this, its a dreary world she's existing in, she's dirty, covered in gooey lubricant and has to monitor her camers so she can be watched constantly or "they" will torture and kill her.
I really enjoyed your voice here. You have a great way of translating your ideas. I adored this line, "Her toolbox looked, to the casual observer, like any other back mounted post-human augmentation. It was greyish, squat and perched on her back with all the aesthetic design and apparent comfort of an eye infection" - it made me smile because I got it right away. Beautifully said.
I know other people have said that the british captains voice is weird and doesnt work but it worked for me. Something is wrong on this ship, he is just an extension of that with his weird phrasing and overly cheerful nature.
Keep writing, this was really great and I was so bummed when I got to the end, I wanted more!
aw, thank you, you're lovely.
There are some really good concepts here (as mentioned by others). I liked that the character is so attuned to her ship that she can tell something is wrong by the “song”. The idea of being constantly watched is very 1984, but being tortured to death for being off camera by accident has a really dark almost comic aspect to it. The plug in tool-box augmentation is well thought out, and you build the tone really well. The third act doesn’t quite do the story justice for me, though the very end was nigh on perfect. You could have ratcheted up the tension a little more. It was over a little quickly for me to comprehend the danger she’s in. Having said that though, the fact that you give her the choice of self-preservation or playing the hero, and she chooses the former, is brilliant. With just a bit more development on the discovery and race for survival, I think you’d have a very good story here.
Hi There, thanks for sharing your story. It was an entertaining read. I liked the feel of the story and Agatha herself. I thought it was pretty great that she could feel something wrong just by the hum. Great job on that concept. I didn't get the cameras though. What did the government think they would do if they were out of eyesight? Why did she feel like there were no cameras on the other ship? I loved the ghost ship concept after we found out it was all a mirage. That was a great payoff. The only thing I wasn't crazy about was the last sentence because that's from the creature's POV and not her's so how would we know? Other than that, great job. ~Sam