Yamaku Book Club (20220124 Dish Washing)

[Puncyclopedia]

Reading it now in anticipation of later discussion.

[Sea]

Meeting 4!
And oh look, I'm 2 hours late. Fuck.
Anyhoo, discussion is now in session! Have your happinesses been satisfied? Are you instantly thinking about Rin and Hisao taking the roleplay a bit farther? Good, I'm not alone then. I've got the next meeting lined up but after that I though I'd give the much esteemed Kagan Bek a shot at it and pick the story so I can 1) Procrastinate more and 2) Because I love him Soooooo, not much else but to START THE MEETING!
Note: as usual, the link is now up

[Puncyclopedia]

I'll kick this off, I suppose.

"Before we get back to what we were doing, I just want to say that I'm not that good at being you either, I guess. I don't mean to offend you, I just have a hard time understanding you sometimes, but I want to." Rin looks over at me and smiles. There's a pause between us and neither seems to know what to say.

I liked this part, because it's just as effective whether it's Rin as Hisao to Hisao as Rin, Rin as herself to Hisao as himself, or Hisao as himself to Rin as herself. It feels like the entire reason Hisao x Rin works so well in the visual novel is because Hisao WANTS to understand Rin, in spite of his inability to generally do so. Seeing the vice-versa of that here made me smile. I think their somewhat poor depictions of one another (especially Rin's Hisao) indicate that they have a long way to go before they can truly understand, but that's okay; they're here together and in the moment and trying.

Overall, I think the story is a bit slow, but It picks up a lot once Emi shows up - having a third character to bounce Risao and Hisin off helps things dramatically, I think, and seeing how she reacts to each is very interesting. The ending is also classic Rin.

All in all, I thought it was an entertaining read and well worth my time.

[brythain]

I like the 'mirroring' effect in this piece. It's an effective device to show how far Hisao and Rin have come in expressing their theories of each other's minds. This expression is validated by Emi, who catches on quickly to the nature of the experiment.

Even more, I appreciate the craftsmanship of the piece. It's not easy to think 'Rin', and to have Rin think about being Hisao being Rin AND Hisao thinking about Rin being Hisao is a major accomplishment. At the same time, it's more than a literary experiment — there's a genuine warmth that comes across, with these two willing to explore their psychological intimacy at the level of becoming the Other. Beautiful.

[AntonSlavik020]

I LOVED this! I'm not usually a big Rin fan, but this fic is just great. Starts kinda slow, when it's just Hisao being Rin, but when Rin starts being Hisao it gets much better. Then Emi enters the picture, and it's pure gold from there. I loved when Rin first starts impersonating Hisao, and she just says "science", with a permanently depressed look on her face. And lets not forget the best exchange ever: Emi saying Rin better not have a penis, and then Rin saying that Emi might appreciate it. It's great. Best fic yet.

[Craftyatom]

Well, given that this story was pretty short, let's play Angel's Advocate Lite!
So, to start with, this story has its NICHE. Obviously with shorter works you can't judge them based on their sense of purpose or continuity, so I personally end up looking at what kind of a niche the story fits into. Surprise surprise, the story people voted for because it was "happy" is just that: happiness in a bag. Not pure, unblemished happiness; Hisao mentions during the work that there are moments where he wonders if he's being too hard on Rin, and so I won't say that this is the happiest things could be, but it's damn close. It's the kind of moment that you wish you could just bottle up and take with you, and luckily enough, Oddball does just that! The only downside is that people might catch you grinning at your screen like an idiot.
Next up are the CHARACTERS. For a story that's all about the characters' views on each other, it's pretty important to have the characterization down pat. The author is literally writing for characters that are pretending to be other characters, which is like trying to speak another language in a funny accent, which is tough to do unless you happen to have a funny accent anyways. Luckily, WHWR gets everything right in this department. The characters feel fluid and in place, and it's one of the things that makes this story so good.
Finally (I did say this was going to be a short one), we have WRITING. The writing worked perfectly well; that is, the only mistakes I noticed were stray typos. The vocabulary seemed appropriate, and as mentioned, all of the characters seemed fairly well done, so in that sense everything about the author's style and diction went wonderfully. I do wish there had been slightly fewer typos, but they weren't too intrusive.
So, on a scale of 1 to 1007, where 1 is unenthusiastic science and 1007 is finding out that your best friend has a penis, "When Hisao Was Rin" takes the lovely rank of "Sure to Make You Smile."

[Oddball]

Thanks guys. Glad you all enjoyed it.

Sorry about the typos, that's something I'm still working on. I was never good with that sort of thing.

[Mysterious Fox]

I am super glad this kind of thread exists. I feel like the sort of feedback I (usually) give is too clinical for a story's main thread, where I would much rather do nothing than cheer on the author, because I know how hard taking the time to make a story is.

The book club idea is great. I can let it all out, so to speak.

The things in the story that caused me to react, from the top:

… Well, perhaps "lively" is the wrong word.

Personal pet peeve. I hate ellipses in fiction. Generally, ellipses are a vague substitute for the emotion or action the author actually intends. It's used instead of detail. It annoys the daylight out of me. My feeling is that the author should have described something visual, some nonverbal communication, that gives the idea the ellipses represents, like scratching himself or sighing. EDIT: Even better, here's a suggestion of the sort of edit I mean:

. . . Rin has been livelier than I had ever seen her.

Another brush stroke, slow in its precision, crawls across the canvas. And continues to crawl. And more. And a bit more.

And more.

Well, perhaps "lively" is the wrong word . . .

Continuing on . . .

She just distances herself . . .

I feel the author can cut out, "just," and it'll make the sentence punch a bit harder.

"For the paint to dry. The paint has to dry so more paint can be put on top of that paint. It's like baking a cake. You can't put all the ingredients in at once."

"I'm pretty sure you're supposed to put all the ingredients in at once," I tell her.

She looks at me curiously. "Really?" She seems to mull this over for a bit. "Does that include the icing and the candles?"

I love sections like this in any story, when the author can communicate what they want with only dialogue. It's my drug. It floods me with endorphins every time. Not the cute dialogue itself, but that it's only dialogue.

Minimalism. Efficiency. Gonna bask in it for a moment.

Okay, my complaint is the word "curiously." It strikes me a bit too telly on the show-tell continuum. Again, I would prefer if the author had described Rin's body language as they imagined it when they chose that word.

No comments for a few hundred words, because I started believing in the story.

You want to put the weight of the brush against the pointer toe and use the big toe for control. It's more flexible.

Another thing I love when authors do it, moments of "showing your work." It gives the impression of expert knowledge, on the author's part, and draws the reader deeper in. Creates a feeling of trust. Doesn't matter if the information presented is perfectly true, as long as it's enough to satisfy the reader. This created a moment of satisfaction in me.

"Why do you not think more? You should be able to do things you can't do normally, like be a different person,"

When I started caring about how the ending would resolve.

Enjoyable!

[brythain]

About ellipses: my opinion is that they seem to act as a visual rest (more exactly a caesura, perhaps?) in prose. It's possible to use other punctuation marks in this way—dashes, semicolons… but most of them don't carry the oxymoronic idea of continued motion while nothing is happening. It's like a note dying away into space, while still carrying some aesthetic value. In the instance I've used here, it isn't the lazy 'et cetera' function, but more the idea that the trend continues (just as it does in mathematical sequences) but we're sparing the reader the sordid details. That's just me, though.

[Mysterious Fox]

I guess this is a grammatical style aside?

I see what you mean, brythain. As I say, it's a personal pet peeve. The ellipses is acceptable for a casual setting like this, but it's something that I try to push, since no style guide (I know of, at least, I'm all up for being blown away), lists that as an acceptable use. The ellipses strikes me more like an author's commentary inserted into the scene about what the characters are actually doing. It jostles me out of the moment and reminds me that I'm reading a story, when my goal is to be drawn into the world.

It's also super common, most people don't have any issue with it, and it serves the author's purposes just fine, which is the whole point of language. I just feel that whenever an author decides to use them, the flow of the story could be made tighter pretty easily with just a few words of detail.

[Oddball]

Generally, ellipses are a vague substitute for the emotion or action the author actually intends.

I don't use them as a substitute for anything.

If there's an ellipse, usually it means nothing notable is actually happening.

If I'm using therm, I don't WANT the scene to be tighter. They make things slower, duller, and more drawn out.

[Mysterious Fox]

"Intend" was a poor word choice. Sorry about that.

I guess what I meant was that I want to see what is in your imagination. The ellipses strikes me like a curtain that I can't see behind. Even if there's nothing important there, it's still hidden away. Again, this is a pet peeve regarding one use of one technique I dislike. I enjoyed your piece; I just get hung up on it disproportionately. With the folks I work with IRL, I push them to find something to replace the ellipses with that creates the same feeling of delay. They usually find something that works better or they take it out entirely.

Also, you caught me in another wording ambiguity. When I say, "tight," I didn't mean, "fast paced," I meant, "airtight." I agree, slow in that section is exactly what it needs; I just think writing out what your imagination sees, even if it's nothing, could be better.

Along those lines, I'm not sure if you'd find my edit on my longpost interesting or not.

[Mirage_GSM]

Personal pet peeve. I hate ellipses in fiction. Generally, ellipses are a vague substitute for the emotion or action the author actually intends. It's used instead of detail. It annoys the daylight out of me.

You probably should stay away from my stories then, since I like to use them a lot.
I agree with you if it's about using them at the beginnings of sentences - or worse instead of whole paragraphs, but they're perfectly valid to show someone trailing off or something like that even without any headscratching involved.

[dewelar]

Since I really don't have much to add to the overall positive response to this story, I'll chime in on this discussion instead.

Personal pet peeve. I hate ellipses in fiction. Generally, ellipses are a vague substitute for the emotion or action the author actually intends. It's used instead of detail. It annoys the daylight out of me.

You probably should stay away from my stories then, since I like to use them a lot.
I agree with you if it's about using them at the beginnings of sentences - or worse instead of whole paragraphs, but they're perfectly valid to show someone trailing off or something like that even without any headscratching involved.

I agree that ellipses are useful for portraying certain patterns of speech/thoughts that aren't really covered by existing punctuation. People talk - and think - in ways that don't mimic written speech, often pausing in places where commas or semicolons wouldn't make any sense. I also don't feel that such pauses warrant breaking up such passages via replacing them with descriptive verbiage. Not only would said verbiage likely disturb the flow of the passage, but it might deliver a message that the author didn't intend by causing the reader to "hear" the speech/thoughts in a different way.

[Oddball]

So, any other thoughts on the story rather than the punctuation in it?