edropus

Jack Schatz doesn't trust the Doc. The Doc is short and thick and his glasses extend past either side of his face so you can see things behind him, all warped and distorted through the lenses. He also has a moustache that from the front looks thin and trim but from the side sticks out as far as his nose, like the head of a seldom-used toothbrush, the back pressed to his upper lip. Jack's sitting in one of those desk-chair combos where the desk and the chair are fused together with hollow aluminum bars and the center of gravity is so far forward that to tip the whole thing backwards with someone sitting in it requires a remedial knowledge of physics or a resumee in backwards-chair-tipping with no less then five years of direct experience and extensive medical documentation of light trauma to the back of the head, which Jack has, though not in actual resumee form.

By tipping his chair back until the seat is situated at a forty degree angle to the plane of the floor Jack has managed to find this center of gravity and see-saws back and forth between the no-return zone of petty cranial bruising and the prospect of slamming the desk's two front legs back onto the tile floor which may damage the tiles, (which, like everything at Ft. Lond, are stained with coffee and the sticky musk of boredom) gain the attention of the Doc, (who, like everyone at Ft. Lond, drinks far too much coffee and seems soley concerned with wrapping Jack's mind in alternatingly thin and thick layers of boredom, the former (training, eating, I.E., not sleeping) as insulation against the crushing weight of the next larger (batallion lectures, chapel, reminders that Ft. Lond is the sole alternative to the brig, dishonorable discharge and optionally extended time in civilian prison for crimes committed) layer), lose Jack the respect of his comrades, (who, with listening to the Doc as their only alternative, observe Jack's precarious teetering with the breathless attention of bomb-diffusing specialists) and, most importantly, obnoxiously bang on the ceiling of the Sgt. Major who, having his regular afternoon routine of hating people who aren't there disturbed, will, most likely, put down his coffee mug, exit his office, turn right, walk up a flight of stairs that turns back on itself once, turn into the second floor hallway, walk to and then enter the second door on the left and then hate Jack by yelling at him. The Sgt. Major might even bring his coffee with him and pour it on the floor, and make Jack lick it up, or do something equally confusing to someone like Jack, who has no sense of pride whatsoever to abuse as punishment.

Jack imagines that Ft. Lond is where desk clerks go for basic training. It's all filing cabinets and wire-mesh trash cans.

The Doc's glasses and moustache and short, thick body offend Jack because Jack sees lots of men like this. They come out of some mold he doesn't understand. Jack knows that the world is not nearly as complicated as most people think and that out of the supposedly endless combinations of environment, upbringing and personal experience there are, in fact, a signifigant but definately chartable number of possibilities which repeat themselves over and over, meaning that if you were to find this number (x) and divide the population of the world (y) by it you would get the actual number of people who exist, duplicates factored out. Jack isn't sure how many people this is (the math of his original equation, in fact, is as wrong as it can be while still maintaining a basic understanding of the variables) but he's pretty sure it's somewhere around ninety. The thick glasses-bristle-moustache man is one of the kinds Jack doesn't understand. He understands two kinds: his own (self-aware stupidity, unkillable) and his father's (stupid, killable). When Jack sees those headlamp glasses and the moustache he imagines them as the pedophile's swiss army knife.

The Doc is saying:

"If we assume that all reality exists as the perception of sentient awareness and that, as before, time is simply a self-replicating cycle, the repetition of which is triggered by differences in said perceptions, and that, upon each cycle, the new replications, in fact, repeat themselves within the same space as the former and that, most importantly, the repetition of these cycles stack back onto themselves, one can, in theory, by comparing the cyclical reactions caused by the electrical impulses of sensory perception in two subjects, calculate the current percentage of the whole of the experiences of either subject and, in time, with the correct formulas, not only estimate the precise moment at which awareness ends but even, eventually, paradox notwithstanding, ha ha!, alter the time and events of death itself."

The Doc waves his arms around and draws things on the chalkboard that look like stacked clumps of tall grass. He's insufferably bouncy. Jack remembers being bouncy. Jack was bouncy when he came to basic training. He bounced through the obsticle course. He bounced on marches. Jack has shed his bounce. Now Jack has pluck. This means he's the one they come to when a fuseless grenade needs testing or someone has to be parachuted into German territory to carve up some krauts with a knife. Here's how Jack's pluck works:

BANG!

Jack brings all four of the chair-desk's gyrating metal feet to the tiles at once. He imagines chalk dust flying up from the sill where the erasers sit, but it doesn't happen. Everything goes quiet. Downstairs a door slams.

Jack jumps to his feet. He squeezes his eyes and tilts his head back when he shouts. "Sir, yes, sir!" But the Sgt. Major hasn't made it all the way up the stairs yet. When he manhandles the door open he's still got his coffee mug.

"Does the Pvt. believe that he is displaying a truly American degree of humor in the face of unimaginable buttfuckery when he addresses me before I have even entered the room?"

"Sir, no, sir!"

"Does the Pvt. think that by displaying such an admirable trait that he might lessen the degree to which I am about to completely terrorize him for interrupting the few daily moments of solitude that I am able to enjoy free of inbred shit-for-brains hillbillies such as the Pvt.?"

"Sir, no, sir! Sir, the Pvt. only wants to speed the process up, sir!"

"Is the Pvt. trying to suggest that I don't know how to use my time wisely?"

"Sir, no, sir!"

The Sgt. Major puts his mug down on the table. He looks at the Doc. "About finished here?"

"I was just about to explain the procedure for volunteering."

The Sgt. Major nods. "At ease." And everyone but Jack sits down. "Is there anyone standing right now how would like to volunteer for the Doctor's program?"

"Sir, I would like to volunteer, sir!"

This is how Jack's pluck works.

edropus

This has been here for a few days with 15 views and no posts which, scanning through the pages, is pretty rare. I've seen some admirable critiques here, and can't account for the silence. Even if I can't get any opinions or advice, I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong in posting that I can't get any responses.

Thanks.

astralis

Hi Edropus,

Until I read your reply to your post, I was going to just let this go but because you insist, I'll give you my thoughts because maybe everyone has thought the same thing but didn't want to say it.

First, you give some great advice on the board but like all of us who give advice, sometimes we don't take our own advice. That's how teaching works: you know the principles, but applying them is often a lot more difficult than teaching them. But, maybe this is a first draft, and as Hemingway said, "All first drafts are sh*t."

With that said, let me explain how I read your chapter.

I read until this:
Then I skipped a bunch until this:
Then read for a few more sentences then stopped. I was about to go to a different thread until I read your second post.

So the question is: why did I not read this? I think it's because it was full of description that did not heighten the chapter nor the story. Although this is the beginning of Chapter Two, it still needs to be interesting enough to read and I don't think there was a single thing here that kept me interested. I know what a military office looks like so your descriptions bored me. And they kept going on and on and telling me everything I already knew. I don't really know what's happening only because I can't get through this. And the business with him tipping his chair back was way too obvious and way too much information that didn't really matter.

I think you need to rewrite this and get right to the point or revisit your style. I'm currently reading "The Crimson Petal and the White" which is a twist on Victorian storytelling in the vein of Dickens. It received critical reviews because it embraces long descriptions and makes them fascinating for a modern audience. So, this proves that it's not about long descriptions. Instead, it's about interest. Your second chapter failed to hold my interest, and perhaps the other 15 people who read it before me.

Thoughts on how you can solve this:

-- Eliminate the inner thoughts. The inner thoughts came out as your inner thoughts as you were bored and writing this. That's the way it seemed to me.
-- Link to chapter one and insist that it's read before someone reads this section. That might be very important.
-- The non-sequitors (the thoughts in the parentheses) provided no insight and were therefore an interruption. Eliminate them or make them truly insightful.
-- Shorten the speech patterns. They do seem to take a long time to read and much longer to say.
-- There's no suspense. The metal chair/desk does not work. Create suspense, which establishes interest.
-- What happens in this scene is not interesting at all. You might be able to make it more interesting by making it more suspenseful though, and letting me learn more about the character. As it is, these don't seem like interesting characters to know. My time is valuable. Why would I want to spend any time learning about him? I have no reason to care unless you make me care. So, make me care.

I know you can do it so please take my criticism as something that is straight and honest. I receive it myself and sometimes it stings, but it hurts so good because maybe it's true.

__________________
How to write a story

edropus

Oh my God how could you say those things about this brilliant piece. You obviously don't know how to write.

Sorry, I just like to meet expectations. =P

Thanks, your critique was well-written and thoughtful. I am an 'audience writer', that is, I can't write (anything) unless it's for a specific audience, and there's no audience I like better then one that hates what I'm doing. I'm also completely and utterly inable to read anything I write without immediately going into the state of mind in which I wrote it, so am unable to critique so much as a sentence. I appreciate it very much.

astralis

You got me. After I read the first sentence I was like, "oh, boy...". =)

That was good. I look forward to seeing a rewrite.

__________________
How to write a story