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The Heart Machine :oR: Struggles Operating
How It Rates
Description
Struggles=Teddy Bear, trying to hook up with Greta=Inventor of the Heart Machine=a gimmicky plastic heart mood machine meant to open up doors to heaven. Most of the world has died from a disease that combusts the organs of children=the world trying to forget.
Comments
I think you had a really interesting concept here, but I needed more background, and more scenery. I couldn't picture where any of this was happening, and that distracted me.
Struggles and Greta were both really well-defined characters, and I liked their interplay - it seemed very real, very human (even though he isn't). The dialogue was handled well also.
There were some difficult sentences and word choices that I tripped over and that pulled me out of the story. During re-writes, I'd focus on how the story sounds (read it outloud to get a feel for it), and adjust things accordingly.
Thanks for sharing your work :)
Dufrescm summarized most of my feedback. I'd add that the pacing feels rushed, like everyone's talking really fast and without giving the reader context on what we're discussing.
I'm not going to add to the down votes, but I can't up-vote either. :( I think the idea has some potential, just not in this venue. The concept has too much of the "unicorn army spawned from a shoe hitting the sun" feel to it. As a reader, I couldn't quite get a handle on the science part of the world that Struggles and Greta exist in. The Heart Machine either exists by Fiat or doesn't work at all as far as I can tell. You can say the same about Struggles. For this venue, there needs to be something a little more believable to explain his existence.
Might do better as a Wacko/Crazy world style fiction? Keep at it!
I struggled through this a bit, and I think it's because the story didn't feel grounded. It sits astride a fence between fantasy and sci-fi... but doesn't lean to either side enough to get a handle on what it is. The heart machine is a nice idea, and I like the idea of an interactive dolls house giving out feelings. The characters are nicely defined in their misery, and it has a low key tone about it that I like. Some of the language used and sentence structures do confuse, the one I picked out was "He loved too much the women calling him cute in his living body of false miracles." The 'too much' is ironically enough too much for the sentence, and it happens again a couple of sentences later. The text is unwieldy at times and needs more in the way of flow to it. Really the problems such as they are shouldn't be too hard to fix. Simplify the language and give it more flow and you'd have a decent tale.
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