Help me out on the first, unfinished draft for a short sci-fi story
13 replies, posted
I'm looking for comments on quality more then anything. I know I need to fact check my science, but I don't sci-fi for the science anyway. Thinking about adding this, (once complete) to my short story collection about when man leaves earth. Too much sci-fi that portrays today as a long, long time ago, ya know? I'm thinking like 2150. Have at it.
'C-c-captain…!'
'Robertson….don’t panic.'
'But-! No, how, how is something like this down here? They told us, d-dammit, they told us, nothing bigger than a guppy! Raca curse them, th-those were Hayward’s words, n-n-no bigger than guppies, c-cause how d-dark it was down here! ‘No light, no life’! That’s what he said! Ha! Hahahahaha! What a load of cram! '
'Dammit Robertson, I said not to panic! It’s not chasing us, it hasn’t attacked! You breaking down right now sure as hell is not going to keep us alive. Look! It’s just staring at us, if even that. Dammit Robertson, I said look!'
Robertson opened his eyes, before whimpering and closing them again. He had been in the war, the third big one, and he had, many times, stared death in its metal-gray eyes. But he couldn’t do it anymore. He had joined the Europa Sea exploration team to get away from all the people who hated him for killing, who hated him for surviving, which was basically every human left on major hubs. Down here, under 100 miles of the blackest sea, beneath 2000 miles of solid ice, he had been sure he would never see another weapon pointed at him again. Which was good, he would have simply shot himself if he had had to run for his life one more time, if his heart didn’t burst first. He needed peace.
Floating no more than 100 ft away from the humming, bus sized submarine, was a creature of such utter immensity, their light could only illuminate an incredibly small portion of the beasts face. Or what appeared to be a face, as there were no eyes or nostrils or ears to identify. Only a mouth, a mouth to swallow Robertson’s trembling peace.
And yet the man refrained from shattering all together. He held himself above his feet, if only by way of locking his knees. But the effort was made and entertained limited success. When his breath finally became slower than his heart, he managed to squeak out his thoughts, pausing in between each.
'Wh-what the hell is it? '
'No way there’s enough volcanic activity to support something this huge! Where’s its food coming from?'
'I would rather have been shot down by a fucking American than by this alien thing! '
'Lo, lo, Raca save my soul. '
'W-were g-gonna die down here, aren’t we Captain?'
There is no response; the man is talking to his own echo. The Captain had not been listening, though this is less a matter of grievance with his quivering first mate than it is his own quiet form of shock, the only kind allowed those who must keep the moral of others in check in times of peril. It is the only sort of shock that allows for hope.
Sometime after Robertson once again lapsed into silence, the Captain finally spoke. It was not a response, at least not to his first mate, who had sidled to the floor to lie still.
'Poseidon…thou art unmitigated might.'
The creature was vast. The borders of the thing stretched beyond the reach of the spotlights, leaving size to imagination. All that the eye knew was that it was big, bigger than any being ever seen on Earth. It could swallow a blue whale whole; surely it would take but a breath for the being to incorporate the, by proportion, pathetically expensive and labor intensive vehicle in which they sailed. Abreast it on either side are thick masses of purple tendrils, like a garden of seaweed.
The Captain was reminded of monkfish. The flesh was grotesque and leathery, but leather like leather that’s been soaking for a long, long time and has long since began to fall apart. And yet these strands of ancient flesh did not disconnect into the tide, rather Maybe this was the answer. This creature was a god, a god that has swam in the immense waters since the beginning of time. Death and life had not yet separated on this world, one a half-step beyond the other. The fingers of the two states of being are yet so deeply interlocked on this planetoid that the Captain, who was not a religious man by any contemporary view of the word, was nevertheless shaken when Robertson said, from his vantage on the metal floor of the sub, that:
'It’s like s-s-something out o-of the Bible!'
'Maybe it is, Robertson, maybe it is. '
'O-oh, now you hear me. Captain, for a second I thought you might be further gone than I am!'
A smile makes itself casually past the Captain’s teeth, surprising him and in turn prompting a scowl.
'Sorry mate. I…I guess I was caught up in shock too.' He stares at his shoes for a moment, eyes drifting, before lifting his chin and staring back out at the maw of the beast. 'Robertson, you fought in the war, yeah? '
'Y-yeah.' He looks at the Captain cautiously. People out here weren’t supposed to know about that, the Administrator of the Europa Sea Explorations had given him his solemn word. Regardless of the how the Captain learned this…oh, ‘I would rather have been shot down by a fucking American’. He had given himself away. This could quickly turn into a confrontation if they had opposite worldviews. A lot of people still thought that the Capitalists should have won the War, and it’s not like either man had much to lose by killing the other.
'Well, me too. I fought with America, actually. Relax! Don’t get up so quickly, anyway, the blood’ll rush to your head and you’ll pass out for good this time. I was drafted, and then I deserted. I don’t think that dismantling their economic system was worth the death of billions, but I had no love for them either. That’s not important anymore, not with this…I hesitate to call it Thing, lest it hear me. Poseidon, why do you sit and just breath at us? '
'M-maybe it k-knows we’re here, maybe it’s t-trying to figure out what we’re going to do!' Robertson was still riding every clenching drop of his shock, and wasn’t really sure if his heart was going to explode or if it already had. His mind was racing. 'M-maybe, mmm…May…Maybe it’s intelligent.'
The Captain turned a face of violence toward the man across from him. His own shock receding, he needed something to vent his frustration into, and Robertson was painting himself bull’s eye red.
'You are a stuttering fool!' He shouted. With a start, he turned back and examined the beast. No movement. He returns to the man across from him and lowers his voice to a menacingly low rumble. 'First, it does not take intelligence to watch one’s prey. It might run, it might hide, it might bite back! All predators examine before they pounce. Second, there’s nothing intelligent down here. Where are its cities? Where are its cars? Where are its weapons? In the fifteen years since we first landed here, why has it not spoken? You took a class on this, did you not? Of course you did, we all did just to get into this sub.'
Robertson, an hour earlier, would have scowled back at his Captain. As it was, he lay his head back to the floor. Was it the Captain’s fault that his view of intelligence was so limited to the capacity to build and destroy? Was it any man’s?
'Y-y-yep, sure did. Hehe. Same man said n-no bigger than a guppy. '
The Captain quietly cursed and quietly stomped over to the view hatch. He squinted. There are chunks of stuff floating in and out of the webs of tendrils. At first glance, it had seemed to be detritus, remnants of the leather flesh finally peeling away after countless eons. But this was not so. The Captains eyes widened at the realization: they were separate creatures! There must be an entire ecosystem riding along this thing.
'Good god, you are an entire environment! '
'W-what?' Robertson had wanted to say something more pointed to the Captain after the way he had been handled, but he would not. Too close to death for meanness.
'There are some sort of fish, well, fish as a general term, I am no biologist, there are fish living in its hair! '
'You c-call it hair? I th-thought it was more like fins.'
'Oh, it does not matter. The point is, this could explain how something this big could live down here. It’s symbiotic somehow. It must be, there’s no other explanation!' The Captain’s excited, and this worries Robertson. 'This is the greatest discovery this administration has ever made! We must signal back to base immediately. Robertson, prepare the torpedo beacon. If we’re gonna die, we’re going to die heroes.'
'Captain! We should just leave! If there’s movement in the water this thing’s probably going to act. As is, the only reason it hasn’t eaten us is probably cause we’re floating on tides. Thing’s obviously blind to light, there’s none down here. What if it hunts by movement? Everything down here’s slow, if we leave full throttle then we may very well escape!'
'Empty handed? So that someone else can come down here and do what you are to afraid to do? Come now Robertson, do it or else step aside. '
The First Mate stares up puzzlingly at the Captain. He is still lieing on the floor, nowhere near the controls. Without a sound, he places his head back down.
'Right then mate.'
The Captain punches in coordinates, sets instructions for release, prepares the broadcaster inside of the torpedo to accept incoming information, and connected it to the main sensors of the ship, which he prepared to use to bombard the creature with every data gatherer known to the administration. He boiled all of his programming to three launch buttons, one to launch data collection, and another to launch the torpedo. The last he programmed to send the ship in the same direction as the torpedo, towards the Great Crack, the only maintained gap in the wall of ice that covered Jupiter’s 4th moon.
'Robertson, if it was movement that startled the beast, then those fish flitting about would send it into a frenzy. They are all over its body and it does not seem to care. We are going to be fine, and when we get back, we’re going to be heroes, just you wait.'
Robertson didn’t move.
'Hmph. Fine, be that way. I’ll remind you, everything going on in here has been recorded for paperwork purposes. They’ll all know who the true hero was this time!'
The Captain slapped the first button. There is a pause, a breath of time so narrow, only vibrations can run their course. Computers warm up, electric permissions are given, and said vibrations run, run away…
There is a crash, the sound of two worlds colliding, ripping through and claiming all. The sub surges as the entire ocean seems to tremble. Data comes surging in to the computer. Words and images flash across the screen.
[editline]29th July 2013[/editline]
A simple good or bad would suffice. Four or five strokes of a keyboard later, and you've done me a solid.
Generally, you should:
Use these quotes for dialogue: ""
Use these quotes when a character is quoting someone else: ''
Use past tense for stories. Towards the end you use present tense a bit like here:
[quote]
There is a crash, the sound of two worlds colliding, ripping through and claiming all. The sub surges as the entire ocean seems to tremble. Data comes surging in to the computer. Words and images flash across the screen.[/quote]
Science fiction like this also has more dialogue. The bulk of such stories, or at least the ones I've read, are both characters deciding what to do and why. There's no real conflict if all Robertson does is lie on the floor.
In terms of verisimilitude, why are they sending explorers down in a submarine with no biologist? What are they exploring if it's not the guppies?
Also, the descriptions of the beast are inconsistent. If this is the blackest of oceans, why are they able to see things not lit by the submarine? If it dwarfs the viewport, how can they tell that:
[quote]Abreast it on either side are thick masses of purple tendrils, like a garden of seaweed. [/quote]
Another suggestion: I think Captain's life could be expanded upon, too. What is with his bizarre obsession with heroism? Why does he immediately assign religious significance to the fish, and why does he address it in second person if Robertson's the only one believing it's intelligent? I think these can be better answered through a couple expository paragraphs about him at some point, or maybe if he could discuss it with Robertson during some last-minute confession when things turn sour. These are just ideas, anyway.
[quote]And yet these strands of ancient flesh did not disconnect into the tide, rather Maybe this was the answer[/quote]
I can't understand this sentence. The two that follow it don't make much sense either. I think they could be cleaned up to read better and better convey your ideas about it.
[quote]
Floating no more than 100 ft away from the humming, bus sized submarine, was a creature of such utter immensity, their light could only illuminate an incredibly small portion of the beasts face. Or what appeared to be a face, as there were no eyes or nostrils or ears to identify. Only a mouth, a mouth to swallow Robertson’s trembling peace. [/quote]
This paragraph is kind of clunky and contains two incomplete sentences. I suggest something like:
The submarine shed light upon an immense beast. Presumably, the beast faced it too, though all that could be seen of its face was its mouth. Soon, it would open and dwarf the submarine, her crew, and Robertson's dwindling peace of mind.
In addition, I think you should add all the relevant features of the beast here too, in one paragraph. Namely, the tendrils at the side and detritus floating about should be included in the paragraph that describes the beast.
[quote]There is a crash, the sound of two worlds colliding, ripping through and claiming all.[/quote]
This sentence again. I'm not sure what worlds, collisions, or claims you're talking about. There is obviously a metaphor here but it isn't clear.
Anyway, it's good. I'm just on the internet so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Originally, there were no quotation marks, just italicized narration and distinct voices to distinguish characters. But yeah, most of those mistakes were the result of a hasty draw up. I didn't really take the time to consider why the hell there'd be humans down there without real scientists.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. I finished the first draft, though I still need to go back and fix the broken bits. Anyone interested in how it ends?
[QUOTE=Dr. Fishtastic;41662263][/QUOTE]
And here I thought this wasn't the internet.
[editline]31st July 2013[/editline]
Ok, well I'm posting the end to this story for my own shits and giggles.
.........
There was a crash, the sound of a meteor ripping through the crust of this world, but it is not so. The sub surges as the entire ocean trembles, but the epicenter of this quake comes not from without, but from within. Data comes surging in to the computer. Words and images flash across the screen, and the torpedo launches, swooshing back home through the ink. Though the men inside cannot see past the rumbling walls of their submersible, the beast is shaking as one who has been pushed out of bed in the midst of a dream. It does not see the two men as they tumble amidst equipment, saved from fatal collision with sharp edges only by the automatic deployment of their Life Suits, safely encasing them in padding suitable to safely jump down Niagra Falls. It does not need to. It knows.
The tremors slowly faded to a quiver, both Life Suits deflating proportionally. When both men were able to stand, they choose to remain hugging the floor. There was a long, long pause before either men is willing to unclench their eyes, teeth, or bowels. Finally, Robertson speaks.
This…This better not be what heaven looks like.
Who says you’re going to heaven?
Captain, are you trying to be funny? Ahhh, ahhh fuck! Is your head ringing like mine? Ahhhh!
Silence, again.
You just like the sound of your own voice, don’t ya Captain?
Shut your mouth and open your eyes, fool. Don’t dwell on the finger either fool, just look to where I point.
Stress has varied effects on its victims. Since its effects are largely dependent on how long it has hold, it is often impossible to gauge someone’s reaction after prolonged stressed based on the first few moments. The Captain had been shaken off his hope by the most recent tremors, and was reverting to a more animalistic state. He was emotionally devolving rapidly. Vindictiveness, long since buried by the usual array of responsibilities and outside expectations, was now laid bare. And what he was currently looking at threw him into hysterics.
Robertson was exhausted. His shock had culminated in the waterquake, and his life has flashed before his eyes. He is too tired to feel much of anything else, but his visitation to history had been balancing. Perhaps he had already died, so there wasn’t much left to worry about. It didn’t matter.
I pity you.
This, Robertson said with every grain of childlike genuine nature. He turns to the viewport.
The Captain did not hear Robertson’s words, nor did he hear the man stiffen. The lights appeared strangely undamaged, and by some trick of reflection illuminated their environ better than before. They were surrounded, caught in the cold net of the creature’s living mane. Yet, through the floating reeds of aether, both men could clearly see that the creatures ‘face’ had not moved in relation to the sub. There were few logical (according to the Captain’s mind) explanations for this occurrence, so naturally the Captain deliriously latched unto the one that frightened him the most.
It was his turn to stutter.
Sh-shit, th-there’s m-m-more of them! Robertson, man data collection! We gather information on the way out!
The Captain jumped to the controls, triumphantly slapping down his second button. During this time, Robertson walked to the controls slowly, never taking his eyes away from the Maw. His head was throbbing, the ringing growing deeper and brighter, sharper and thicker. A glance at the screen now before him suggested what the Captain confirmed.
What?! It’s not working! Power’s been disconnected! Robertson! With a whirl of hair and spittle, he turns on his first mate. What have you done?
Claws outstretched, the Captain leaps at his first mate. With recently manicured nails, he grabs the throat of his fellow man, and squeezes. Robertson is caught by another surge of migraine, and cannot defend himself. Black dots swim before another tremor knocks the Captain loose. He tumbles to the floor, landing into his life suit. The ship quiets again.
The Captain screams, wrapping his arms around his head. Robertson, turns, massaging his temples violently. So the sociopath did feel it, and is he crying? Indeed, he’s sobbing uncontrollably.
I didn’t desert. I was discharged.
What did this matter now? The Captain had been right, the time for trembling over the war was over.
People hate you, and what you did. People hate me for what I didn’t do. My family wanted me to be a hero, to save the day, to save their ‘freedoms’. Freedom, peh. Having twenty different brands of cereal to choose from wasn’t freedom. Freedom to choose the channel! I couldn’t care less about their freedoms, except that it made them happy. And I couldn’t save anything, not even myself.
Ahh! What horrible pressure! This wasn’t like any trauma Robertson had ever experienced. He couldn’t stand anymore, he couldn’t think. He could barely open his enough to see out the window. The light…was definitely getting brighter. So bright it burned. Wait! But the electricity? Ahhh, the pressure!
The pain recedes. Robertson opens his eyes, and he is back on base surrounded by his colleagues. In a flash, he is outside of the base, atop of the icy, featureless tundra that is Europa. Flash, flash, and he is falling, falling, falling down into an abyss so cold, and so deep, then…splash.
Back in the submersible now. The light was so bright. So bright, Robertson and his Captain disappeared into the light.
…
Hehehe, Howard you salty dog, how’d you manage?
Howard grinned a slick grin. Well, it’s not hard when you’re a professor out here. Only a few kinds of people choose to get stuck here at the Crack. Any woman out here on this winter wonderland is obviously a fan of intelligent, older men, scientists as they are. And the other professors are nothing to look at, being either ancient, women, ancient women, or, in Steve’s case, Cyborg.
I wouldn’t get to cocky, Howard, I’ve heard some rumors that a good amount of the girls here are in to that sort of-
A pair of red and green lights began to strobe. There is the murmur of microphones turning themselves on, and a faintly robotic female voice sounded.
Torpedo beacon detected. Preparing data transit. All hands to observation and coding.
The hell? Howard, what teams are out today?
Umm, well sub 3 and 4 are out, but 4’s within direct contact range.
Why the hell would 3 send out a beacon?
Why, exactly, would I have any clue until I see what’s on the disk?
Well I su-
Red and green lights begin to strobe. A faint hiss and crackle, and the automated voice returns to regale:
Unsolicited activity in loading bay, advised to observe.
Are you kidding me? Oi, what a morning.
With a sigh and a click of a switch, a monitor hums to life. The camera it is linked to is positioned directly over the point where ice meets water, amidst a man-made grotto.
…
…
Howard, what is that?
It’s…a light?
Please don't change between tenses.
[editline]1st August 2013[/editline]
Pretty please.
It's a draft. I can edit mechanical things later, or is it really so glaring that I can't get feedback on the general quality of the writing?
Well, yeah. You should read over your story once or twice to fix the grade school grammar mistakes before asking other people to read it.
Like what if someone posted a song they recorded and all the instruments were out of tune with each other and they were like "yeah I know it's just a draft, what do you think of it other than that though?"
I really don't think it's the same thing, there's a difference between a lack of polish and a lack of coherence. The story doesn't seem, to me, to fall apart, at least not for so basic of a reason. I'm asking for opinions of the story's soul, not editing information I could get from a grade school teacher.
Thanks for the attempt though.
I looked over a bunch of it and the writing is very bad, I'm sorry. But before you get crits on style and word choice and stuff you need to get your basics--grammar, punctuation, etc--correct. You have to know how to crawl before you can walk. If you can put together a story with those essentials correct, then you'll be ready to move on to more serious stuff.
You aren't helpful. There is no such thing as correct mechanics for literature, there are just certain styles overly considered to be universal. All you're doing is trying to belittle my work by calling it less than serious. To me this is seriously a first draft to something I'm trying to seriously build upon. If I've excluded mechanics and you want to the the time to say it's bad, don't tell me why it is that you don't need to elaborate, elaborate. Criticism should be constructive.
Again, thanks for the attempt.
There is such a thing as correct mechanics for writing. Masters who understand why those mechanics exist are able to ignore them for specific reasons in some circumstances, but you clearly haven't bothered to learn them at all. Hiding behind the excuse that it's "literature" isn't going to get you anywhere. I'm not going to crit your whole story because I'd be up all night, but just the first paragraph of your ending is rife with errors:
[quote]There was a crash, the sound of a meteor ripping through the crust of this world, but it is not so.[/quote]
This is a bizarrely, unnecessarily specific metaphor that describes something nobody's ever heard before, so it doesn't even help me imagine what you're trying to describe. It's so impossibly hyperbolic that it's meaningless. You also switch tenses in the middle of a sentence for no reason whatsoever. "This world" and "it is not so" are weird, awkward phrasings that make me think you might be ESL? I don't know though. Like if so, props for coming this far but there is a ways to go.
[quote]The sub surges as the entire ocean trembles, but the epicenter of this quake comes not from without, but from within.[/quote]
Your diction is all over the place--"sub" is very colloquial and informal, yet at the same time you're using very stilted and pretentious phrases like "not from without, but from within." You should pick a level of diction and stick with it.
The word "surge" is a poor choice, as A) it's transitive, and B) it's generally used to refer to fluids or fluid-like things. Water surges through an opening. A crowd of people surges towards a door. You might have a surge of electricity. But a single solid object doesn't "surge"--it's a misuse of the word.
This also marks the second time you've used a very elaborate and specific description as an analogy for what's happening, even though it's not actually happening. Mixing metaphors is a bad idea at the best of times, but doing it before the reader even knows what's going on is a surefire way to confuse the hell out of them.
[quote]Data comes surging in to the computer.[/quote]
Okay, where to start?
-"Into," not "in to."
-"Data" is plural.
-You just used the word "surge" in the last sentence. Try not to use the same words over and over.
[quote]Words and images flash across the screen, and the torpedo launches, swooshing back home through the ink.[/quote]
You're not painting a clear picture here. "The" screen? I'm pretty sure a submarine has lots of screens. What do the words and images say? Do they contain information that's important to the reader, or are they just what you are imagining shows up on a screen when a submarine launches a torpedo? This might be a good opportunity to do some research and find out how a submarine launch procedure is actually handled, because what you're describing sounds wildly inaccurate even to my layman's sense.
Swooshing back home? What does that mean? Where is the torpedo's home? Back in the launch tube? I thought it just came out of the launch tube? If you mean "home" as in "he drove the sword home" then you don't need to use the word "back," that's idiomatically wrong and just confuses the sentence.
As for "through the ink"--is there ink in the water? Or do you mean the water is black as ink? Again, the phrasing is clumsy and unclear.
[quote]Though the men inside cannot see past the rumbling walls of their submersible, the beast is shaking as one who has been pushed out of bed in the midst of a dream.[/quote]
See, now you're using "submersible" when you used "sub" a couple lines ago. That's inconsistent diction again. And the way you phrase this makes it sound like the submarine is the beast--you're describing two separate subjects doing two separate things in one sentence, so without context a reader would assume you know what you're doing and are referring to the submarine in both parts.
Secondly, "shaking as one (more annoyingly supercilious diction) who has been pushed out of bed in the midst of a dream"--ANOTHER metaphor, jammed in the same phrase this time, as I'm assuming beasts don't normally sleep in beds. And once again it's so specific as to be unrelatable. I've never pushed someone out of bed in the middle of a dream, I've never seen it happen to anyone, and if I did, I wouldn't expect them to shake, I'd expect them to shout, or yell "ow" or swear and wake up and look around. When you use metaphor to help describe things you're supposed to be appealing to universal experiences that will make the reader say "oh yeah, like that." All yours are making me do is think "wait, what the hell is he talking about."
[quote]It does not see the two men as they tumble amidst equipment, saved from fatal collision with sharp edges only by the automatic deployment of their Life Suits, safely encasing them in padding suitable to safely jump down Niagra Falls.[/quote]
Here your writing is continuing this trend of being very vague and confusing when it comes to what's actually going on (Two men? What were they doing? Were they firing the torpedo? Why are there deadly sharp objects just lying around a submarine, when submarines are frequently banged and jostled around in combat situations? What ARE the objects? Describing them as "equipment" is similar to describing "words and pictures on a screen" insofar as it makes it seem like you have no idea what the interior of a submarine is like. You don't have to be an expert, but you have to either do enough research or fake it well enough to make us believe you.
Lastly, the whole thing about Niagara Falls (not "Niagra") is, yep, yet ANOTHER pointlessly specific metaphor describing something nobody reading your story will ever have experienced or witnessed. Why would you even name Niagara Falls specifically? They're not even famously tall or dangerous, they just look nice and a lot of tourists go there. It sounds like you wanted to name a waterfall and that was the only one you could think of or something. Again, extreme specificity with regard to stuff that's not even part of your narrative is not helping at all, it's just distracting. By the way, that brings it up to four or five weird overly-specific, unrelatable, contradictory metaphors jammed into this paragraph alone. So, nice job with that.
[quote]It does not need to. It knows.[/quote]
Not much to say here except that this is super corny. And, again, seemingly accidentally and not in any way that facilitates the story, you switch back to the past tense immediately after this part. I'm stopping here though because I spent 30 minutes on 6 sentences.
You see the problem here, I hope. I can't "exclude mechanics" from a critique of this because practically every other word is a mechanical or stylistic error. Your skill level is very low right now. That doesn't mean you can't learn and improve, but if you take this attitude of "I do it how I want, I don't have to learn grammar or convention because it's LITERATURE" you're never going to learn anything, and you'll ultimately be unable to do anything with your writing besides maybe get friends and people on the internet who don't know any better to tell you it's good. If that's all you want from it, then more power to you (though I don't know why you would be asking for help with it). As this is, no manuscript reader would want to touch this with a ten-foot pole.
So, take this and learn from it or reply with more cocky "nice try" crap, I don't really care. I have exercised my editing muscles and reminded myself why I don't crit people's writing on the internet! Goodnite.
No, actually, that was helpful, thank you. You didn't read the first section, and you continued to be insulting simply for the sake of itself, but it does help and I appreciate the time you spent. That was constructive and it will help.
I was insulting because your attitude about literature seemed like it needed some shaking up but also because "thanks for the attempt" seemed like a sarcastic blow-off. Sorry if I misinterpreted!
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