Hi Siggdalos, it's great to be here. I feel a bit bad I seemed to have missed the forum's heyday haha. Thanks for the comprehensive feedback!
I didn't care much for the first two stories.
Yeah, I had just started writing again after a break, so I'm not too surprised. Those were
rough trying to find the balance between detail and action, and I think I strayed a little too close to Stephen King-style in terms of detail for what ended up being fairly short narratives. I tried to keep the reader engaged with suspense, but looking back even I find them tedious to read, especially the first half of "After the Sunset". By the time of the third and fourth stories I had made sure to go over more writing advice and analyze other authors' short stories. It's a small miracle that after the first story anyone wants to read the rest of the collection.
Owen's thoughts and perspective throughout "After the Sunset", particularly how he compares his own situation to the ones in his scrapbook.
I'm glad that worked out. I'd read
Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller before writing it, and one of the things mentioned in the book was how people have narratives in their head that shape the way they view themselves and the world around them. I wanted Owen to process real life horror and his role in it through the lens of the media he consumed as a way of adjusting his own internal narrative to accommodate the fact he now has to kill for a living.
shouldn't O&A have needed an invitation to the house in "After the Sunset" considering that it's currently inhabited?
I do have a line in there about Owen inviting Abby in, but I put it at end of a compound sentence in the fifth paragraph so it's easy to miss.
I really like "A Story in Retrospect". The dialogue and characterization are on point through most of it. The pacing feels good despite its length and the amount of description is detailed enough to give a vivid picture of each scene without being excessive IMO.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how strongly you like it. I tried balancing pacing, description, and tension, but I was afraid it dragged at times. I was worried I'd lose the reader halfway through.
O&A being introduced to Rayman is fun--I myself have thought about what Oskar and Eli's first encounter with video games would be like but have never quite settled on how I want to depict it--but it doesn't take away from the building sense of apprehension running through it all up until the ending.
I'm really happy to hear this! I was channeling my own childhood memories of
Rayman 2 when writing the scene. I also wanted to kind of callback to Abby's unfamiliarity with a Rubik's cube, and how that sort of cultural disconnection might begin to apply to Owen over time as well. They wouldn't really be able to get any familiarity with modern video games unless interacting with other children, so I tried using that as a way to set up the ending and add some ambiguity to their friendship with the narrator.
To be frank about one thing, though, I felt a little bothered by how similar some elements and scenes are to my own "Lights"
Honestly, I haven't read that yet. When I was outlining and drafting, I was actually concerned I was hewing too close to metoo's fanfiction series haha. I'll give yours a read!
EDIT - just started reading yours. And here I thought I was being original. Goddamn, everything really has been done before haha. I was trying to go for that kind of feel where, as a kid, there are moments you don't realize just how close you come to death until you look back as an adult. FWIW, I was inspired to write this after remembering a time I traded ghost stories with a friend after drinks. That throwaway line about a "blue man" is taken from then.
You incorporate the storyteller narrative feel much more effectively than I do, and with a much pithier title. You also do a fantastic job of capturing emotions and feel, which is something I really struggle with. I'd felt my story was a bit too bare on the emotional aspect of being a kid, and reading yours confirms the feeling haha. Wish I'd read yours first!
The section from the daughter's perspective is unrelentingly brutal and horrific in a way I don't think I've seen in any other fanfic on here (not that I've read all that many).
That's great to hear. I tried channeling Stephen King for that, as well as the aggregate feeling from a collection of short vampire stories I had (
Seize the Night, which also has "What Kept You So Long?" by Lindqvist). I noticed when reading a few fanfics that it was easy to gloss over the horror elements or just wave them away with a "this person died, so sad"-kind of feel, so I wanted to show readers how terrifying Abby (and Owen) truly are for their victims while still balancing that against sympathetic elements and keeping the reader rooting for them. Since the American remake was a bit more of a standard horror than the Swedish movie, I wanted to convey that kind of strong horror mood.
O&A's subsequent feelings and rationalization are also convincing (especially the vivid description of the way that his fear of losing Abby overshadows everything else)
I'm glad they felt convincing! Another reason I liked
Meditations on Violence was how it discussed the way violence plays out from the attacker's perspective and how the attackers rationalize violent actions. I wanted to try and incorporate elements of those rationalization processes into Abby and Owen's thoughts. If you haven't read it, it's a good read for writing horror, although I just skimmed over the martial arts stuff.
The only aspect of it I don't like is that, while the pacing is good for the most part, I think it becomes repetitive toward the end--though I think it's saved by the suitably disturbing last paragraph.
Yeah, if you're referring to the very end scene, after the process of rationalization (although I think I even hammered that process a bit too much), it was tough to figure out how to convey innocence of a date vs the killings. I could only think of a few options, and I was afraid it was going to end up being like the first story. Instead, I personally feel like it ended up being too similar to the ending mood of "After the Sunset", which probably contributes to the repetitive feel of the scene. Is there anything you would do differently? I think my imagination is a bit limited there.
IMO you definitely accomplished what you set out to do. If you do ever write anything more, be sure to let us know!
That's fantastic to hear! My greatest fear with fanfiction is character derailment. Just takes the reader entirely out of it. I'll try and think of some additional stories, but I've got trouble with longer narratives, and I think I've covered all I can in short-story format. If you or anyone else wants to take elements from my work, go for it!