[ BUY MY BOOKS! Witch-Girl Season One | The Bridge Across the Sky (Amazon) (Kobo) (Goodreads) ][ Stories: Witch-Girl (Read from the bottom of the list), The Canon ] [ Poetry: All Poetry; ( ♥ ) ( ⚔ ) ]
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[ red_a02 ] Shuzhen – The first episode was a lot of fun, cos it had an interesting cocktail of sexual tension and smooth fight choreography. This episode is like the awkward aftermath...
27 Aquarius 13 18:13
[ vermilion_2 ] YAPX – I understand that most of your stories are dialogue-based and heavy on retorts and counter-retorts. This one felt unnecessarily circular. It starts with a cool premise: a killer/villain/vigilante uses Lent to swear off something that should be second nature to him (I suppose), and then talks about a story. The link between the two (giving up killing & the story) isn’t a 100% fit. Maybe instead of “let me tell you a story”, it could be “hey, you see I even passed a guy up for death today!” or equivalent. Something to drag Lorelei into the banter and the premise. // That’s my only complaint. I’m not a big fan of dialogue-based stories, but I can make a exception for this.
14 Aquarius 13 08:03
[ 130204 ] YAPX – Good pace, good characters, great dialogue. The thing I like best is a combination of the three: how you build up their pseudo-relationship through all that back-and-forth exchange. Somehow, you craft a unique, strange relationship: from any one point in the story, both of them are manipulative, victimised and hypocrites - though not all at once. // On word choices, I felt you could change the word “janitor” (“cleaner” or “uncle” would’ve given a different, but more acute local flavour to it). Mostly because, it’s connotes an added level of difference through: class. Whether or not you intended it, by portraying the “janitor” and “student” you bring out the fact that he’s stuck there socially in all sense of the word. It made the part where he says he reads books during weekends completely out-of-context and weird. // Also, there’s too much “sliding” in and out of the room. Not sure if that’s intentional repetition, or just a lack of other words. // I thought that the girl’s own background is pretty compelling. Even after everything, I can’t tell if she’s speaking the truth. Because I’m all for unreliable narrators and characters, I can still find her well-thought out. But other readers might lose patience or wonder at her sudden change of heart at the final moment.
04 Aquarius 13 08:48
…more…
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shot – Layer 4 – The Stream ♠ 04 Ge♊ini 11, Saturn’s Day ♣ |  |
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“Well well well,” she says.
He sits upon the terracotta tiles looking up at her, seated upon the edge of the fountain. The fountain is still, at this hour of night.
“I wrote a story,” he says, “about you. It ends with you being someone else, a little girl.”
“I read it,” she says, “you never said how he knew.”
“There’s no good reason. The me in the story knows that you’re someone else because he’s written to know it. The story doesn’t have to make sense, because the characters never question the logic of their world. It’s like being in a dream. Whatever strangeness happens in your dream, you never think to think, ‘this is too strange, I must be dreaming.’ Making sense only matters to the reader, not to the characters themselves.”
“That is true. But it doesn’t make for a very good story, does it?”
“You can stop pretending now, I know it’s not you.”
The little girl nods. “Very well,” she says.
“That I don’t know how I know implies that I, too, am a character, being written.”
“And your writer is, himself, being written?” asks the girl, “Turtles all the way?”
“Perhaps a razor,” he says, “if I am caught in a loop, the simple answer would be to break free. And the simple answer as to how to do that would be to kill the person who put me here.”
“Kill the person?” she asks.
“You, of course, as there’s no one else here.”
“Has it occurred to you, perhaps, that you are hallucinating? That you kidnapped me and brought me here and that you are proposing to do something that would likely get you into a lot of trouble?”
He looks at the little girl.
“I didn’t kidnap you,” he states.
“How do you know that?”
“You’re not a little girl. No child talks the way you do.”
“Well, yes,” she nods, “Assuming you’re not imagining this entire conversation.”
“But you were her. Just a few minutes ago.”
“Was I, I wonder.”
He stops. He looks at her and she looks at him, there by the fountain in the quiet of the night.
“Alright,” he says, “I’m trapped, I admit it. If I hurt you, and this is some sort of mental breakdown, I’m screwed. And if I don’t, I’m caught within some alternate reality, also screwed. But I know something else – You’re the Alice, aren’t you?”
“Have we met?” she asks.
“Only once, long ago. You weren’t like this, then.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“I suppose it’s better you than one of the others.”
“I wonder.”
“The thing is,” he says, “I don’t know how I know that this isn’t real. But once I started thinking about it I realised something else; that I didn’t know that terracotta is an actual colour. You can’t write something that you don’t know, can you?”
“I told you that it’s a colour.”
“Yes, you did. And it’s something she would know. Pretending to be her, that’s crossing the line. I’m not entirely sure how hallucinations work, but I suspect that if I were to kill you with an imaginary weapon, and if you were really a little girl of some sort, you wouldn’t be hurt.”
“That might be an unwise supposition.”
He stands up, his eyes never leaving hers, “Regardless, it is mine to make.”
He draws a lightsaber.
“Well well well,” she says.
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“My reason for preferring the darkness is that in the dark you have to describe yourself. In the daylight other people describe you.”
