h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello RK.

Please review my work. I've read some of your reviews and find them honest and open.

Your comments may be useful.

Chrono.

Hi Chrono.

Funny, I have been contemplating today whether I should stop being so honest in my reviews. I seem to be upseting people and my intended points are being lost in the red mist.

However, if you wish me to look at your work and give my honest opinion (I can't help using the brutal turn of phrase) then point me in the direction of some of your short fiction.

I don't like chapters from novels, or stories overladen with poetic description and I'm making a point not to comment on those.

RK

Read away, if you please. You'll find not a single solitary chapter of mid novel nonsense, poetic description or any other flowery cr*p in my stories. just good entertaining stupidness and a smattering of serious issue here and there.

Please read on. Oh, and forget about the Chech Ho one, I was feeling ridiculous that day.

Chrono.

Oh, and be brutal!

Okay, but it'll be later before I can read anything of yours. I'm in the middle of a craft discussion about 'Twist in the Tale' endings and I have some further examples to read.

Imbalance Sheet on my portfolio is a good example of that. Got into the BBC Kent final too!

Recommended reading for the old classic twist (of which I'm not sure you're a fan of after reading your comments on kelliehill's A mothers Love!)

Chrono

I may have some history with that story. Was this one the subject of conversations about alleged vote-rigging? I remember Wordblindproes and others persuading me to post my story 'Hollow Victory' which was inspired by this banter.

It will be good to read your story again after all these months and see it with fresh eyes.

I voted for your story - once!

Voterigging?

Yep, that was the one. Various people got the lug cos it got in the final, but despite hundreds of genuine votes, Wordblindproes (who was also a finalist that month) won by getting over 150 votes in a couple of minutes right at the end! Rigging? Not me, chuck.

Oh, by the way, I was innocent. It was a couple of so-called buddies stirring the cr*p. Thanks guys!

It seems impossible these days that I could've got hundreds of votes and still came fourth out of five! Perhaps I should've cheated!

‘Imbalance Sheet’ is a story about Joseph and how he fell from grace. I made to share the experience with the nameless narrator of Joseph relating how things went wrong in.

But how long ago?

I don’t know until the end, but before then I’m duped into thinking this is a meeting in an office in the very near past. But all is not as it seems. No, six years have in fact passed and Joseph, now a down-and-out is meeting with his old colleague in a coffee shop.

Even after a few months when I first read this story, I’m suckered into the false scenario and I wonder again: how can this be? The answer is simple – bad grammar.

I’m not a stickler for grammar when the story is good, but when the story hinges on it; I’m tut-tutting with the other pedants.

Joseph is made to speak in the wrong tense. He says things like: ‘Normally we get the idiots over from the Chicago...’ when he would have said: ‘Normally WE’D get the...’ or “Normally we used to get the...” It’s a small distinction and I could blame the narrator’s education in relating the story, but he gets things right when he speaks himself.

The only other defence I could put up is that Joseph is so drugged up that he still thinks he works for the company that he’s embezzled. But that doesn’t hold water either because near the end he reverts to the proper tense and says: “...the yanks used to say.”

Because I don’t want to sound superior, and I not, I looked up the correct grammatical term on the Internet and came up with the following definition:

The perfect past tense is the tense of a verb that shows action that has happened in the past or before another time or event: In English, the perfect is formed with 'have' and the past participle of the verb.

Joseph’s conversation takes place long after the event but the use of simple past tense implies the events are recent.

So it’s a trick ending which spoils an otherwise interesting idea for a story.

Thanks for your comments. You seem very good at picking up on the small errors. Good.

Actually, Joseph is talking to a volunteer on a weekly soup run around the homeless, hence his references to sandwiches next week, because a soup run sometimes doesn't have the resources to provide the same food/drink every week.

The narrator is tolerant to Joseph, who's bitterness, resentment and clinical depression keep him locked in the past, again evidenced in his repeated and dillusioned story week after week.

But, hey, there's only so much you can squeeze in 750 words which is the maximum you're allowed. Perhaps more would've fleshed it out more.

Anyway, feel free to murder/praise/be indifferent about my other efforts. It's good to get a different opinion, and I'm only to glad to return the favour, if you had any to review.

Cheers
Chrono

By the way, are you a he or a she? Can't tell from "RK".

Oh, and also your comment about being "suckered into a false scenario" - isn't it obvious at the end that that was the intention? Glad it caught you second time around!

Thanks for your response, I felt like a performing bitch doing tricks so I had to find something, didn't I?

Here was me sounding all superior about grammar and I fecked up the first paragraph in my review. Now that's irony!

See you around.

"I felt like a performing bitch doing tricks so I had to find something, didn't I?"

It's nice to know you had to "find" something in the sense that the piece wasn't so awful it's errors tended to slap you in the face!

Don't feel like a performing "bitch". It's what you're here for isn't it? It's certainly not to post your own stuff or we'd have seen it by now.

Now go, b*tch, before I make you "perform" again.

Later.

Chrono