New profile. Why? Because I'm a cat, that's why.

WRITING

My current active work is Daughters of Icarus (DoI for short) a compilation inter-related of short stories set in the near future. The writing style is minimalist. It's in the fiction:manga section, and I'm trying to capture the fast-paced nature of the graphic novel medium by keeping the narration sparse and fast. Also, like too many manga volumes, I make no commitment as to when it will be updated.

DoI is a collection of short stories, each of which is no more than 10k words. The stories are in turn divided into short chapters, each 1-2k words in length. This again is to approximate my feel of the manga-reading experience - the reader is kept engaged by physically turning the page far more rapidly and more frequently than in a prose presentation.

The stories are each complete unto themselves, but are intended to be read in a serial fashion. While not all manga does this, the spiritual inspiration for DoI, the long-running manga Gunslinger Girl, is also a collection of inter-dependent short stories. However, the stories are not presented necessarily in chronological order. This is a tip of the hat to another treasured manga, 2001 Nights. In that, the stories are all about a given theme and family, but the author relies on the reader to sequence the stories as they are presented.

Lastly, the RAOSC (RPG, Anime, Own Stories, Continued) has been kind enough to review this story as its story-of-the-week selection, and the near-unanimous comment is that it is too sparse. To address this, once I have completed the first volume, I'll post a side-by-side rewritten version of it with more description. However, that will be a much lower priority than the 'lean' version, and will trail it by many weeks if not months.

REVIEWING

I review for me, for my growth. I have found that by reviewing, I have greatly increased my awareness of what works for me in a given scene, line of dialog, theme, etc.

For me, flow is everything. Everything. I want to start the chapter, then be swept away by the mental images and imagined dialogue until I bump into the end of chapter. Anything that might possibly interrupt this flow is a possible point in my review.

This means my reviews are very long, and extremely nit-picky. I will go after SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar). I will call out unintended POV shifts and tense shifts. I will seem like I'm looking for things to criticize. That's because I am.

I expect an author to respect my time as a reader. If the work has fluff, it's wasting my time. If the work is leaden, it's wasting my time. I need to have confidence that the author treasures my time as much as I do. If I lose that confidence, I will drop a story mid-chapter.

Depending on length, I spend up to an hour per review. This means I make no commitments to reciprocate reviews. Remember, I review for me.

If this makes me sound like a total b, so be it. The last time I tried to look at review numbers, it took me a year recover from review-guilt burnout, and I'd rather be a b* on FP than not on FP at all.

Here are some forums in which I have been known to participate:

(Profile v5.0)