January 2009
1 post
Feedback Friday: bunny baby fast and slow →
yesand:
I don’t know much about fiction on the internet. I know there is a lot of it, and that the second-person is very popular, and that I click through most of it quickly in a way that makes me sort of sad because for most of my life I’ve been told what is good to read and it’s possible I don’t know how to recognize what is good on my own. But I like this, and here is why, and maybe someone...
November 2008
3 posts
40 Days and 40 Nights, by Claudia Smith →
distorte:
Feedback Friday #3:
2002 was a confused time for me. My college course was proving… spiritually unfulfilling. I had just discovered the doing of webdesign and thought it might afford me the opportunity to escape the corporate representatives arriving to our open days to try and win us over. I had sickening visions of grey carpets and fluorescent lighting and cubicle culture. My fears...
When the Babies Read The Book of the Dead, by Mary... →
kfan:
Feedback Friday:
I have a five-year-old son. He likes video games where you have to find the objects that will help you escape from a room. He likes books that explain how Japanese castles were organized. He loves sleeping but hates going to bed. One day when he was in pre-school, while the other kids were napping, his teacher found him sobbing, holding a book about turtles. When she...
Feedback Friday #3
meghanagain:
Unpreparing, by Lindsay Hunter
This really just hits a bunch of sweet spots for me. First of all, that first paragraph is not only completely insane, it’s so not what you think. And in fact the juxtaposition of the first two paragraphs is basically what tied me up immediately. It creates this real sort of edgy surprisey sense, like, this is a story that is going to knock you down...
October 2008
3 posts
Feedback Friday: Overqualified: Inventory Clerk →
distorte:
Okay, guys, I missed last week, the official FBF day (second Friday of the month) but I’ve been busy as Croesus and anyway. You can do it whenever you like. So:
I know that Joey Comeau is not exactly unknown on the Internet. I am not plucking a dull pebble from the muddy riverbed, polishing it on my sleeve and revealing its iridescent layers to the crowd gathered round the bank. They...
Feedback Friday #2
meghanagain:
Sean Lovelace: ‘A Sigh Is Just a Sigh’
This hooked into me initially because of how disorienting it was on the first read, and yet, how I smiled my way through that. It was a good sort of disorientation, a druggy sort of montage, like we all went to sleep with Casablanca on, and even that’s not fair because who likes it when their writing is referred to as “filmic”? Unless they are...
Feedback Friday: "I Am Holding Your Hand" by... →
kfan:
This is one my most favorite short stories ever. This is what I want, when I say there’s not enough really good fiction on the internet. This is a master class on how to write fiction that succeeds online.
It’s very short, so there’s not a lot of scrolling. It grabs you right from the first sentence, and each paragraph afterwards contains a really compact yet wondrous little detail that...
September 2008
5 posts
Tadd Adcox, "Substitutions," Fiction Volante →
saladahoy:
Another Feedback Friday. Catch the fever.
Did I listen when kfan and distorte said how brilliant Fiction Volante was? Yeah, but I thought, “Oh, I’ll get to that when I have some time” and when I did, it wasn’t there any more. But thanks to the good people at the Google cache, I was about to read maybe 30 percent of the stories, including “Substitutions.” The thing I like best about...
“EVERY GODDAMNED CHRISTMAS MY DAD AND MY UNCLE RON GET INTO IMPORTANT ARGUMENTS...”
– TIME FOR SOME STORIES
Right. But is it fiction? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. I’ve always said that that the only way to get people to partipicate in fiction online is to trick them into thinking it’s non-fiction. To me, the davesecretaryatwork stories are the epitome of online fiction: tiny epics...
"Cutter" by Mindy Munro (on Six Sentences) →
saladahoy:
It’s Feedback Friday, kids.
The thing I like best about Munro’s piece is the way that telling the reader the conclusion at the outset of the story (twice, if you count the title and the first sentence) actually heightens, rather than diminishes, the suspense in the story.* Even though—or really, because—you know what’s coming, you’re filled with dread as you read. And even if you...
meghanagain:
On Ways of Dealing With Tripping in Public, by Crispin Best.
This story is hilarious. It is a hilarious, hilarious story about someone’s father dying. I laughed roughly forty-eight times while reading this and sometimes I read a joke twice to see if it was still funny the second time, and 100% of the time, the joke was still funny. I am a huge jerk about written comedy. I think it...
distorte:
God’s Love Seemed Lost Upon Him
I know this piece is six months old, but it’s been floating a while for me and when I started looking for something to talk about it seemed a good choice. I’ve no idea who writingstatic is, and can’t remember where I discovered him/her, and maybe it’s better that way. 16 Ways to Make Your Blogjuice More Palatable tells us that we should be selling an...