C. R. Bryan III wrote:

siaru wrote:
    Blushed, flushed, looks a little awkward in proximity. One of them
could be switched for 'colored', perhaps?

    Keep in mind that all of my C&C is nothing more than suggestions.
You can freely ignore me.

I'll do no such thing. Some of your recommendations may work
against design choices and tradeoffs made in the initial writing
and have to be declined, but they'll all be considered, not
rejected out of hand. I go on (and on and on and...) a bit in
here about some of them where you might not see a change in the
final version posted to RAAC.

As to the specific instance... I'll look at that for awhile,
weighing it. 'Color' would imply ample color, working against
the hint-of-tint watercolor theme I'm building. Perhaps I can
find some form of that which mutes the colors yet isn't too
wordy (another minimal-by-design parameter).
Actually, three words make for an awkward sing-song there:
include 'brush' in the kickline. I didn't notice it until you
brought it up. Thank you.

    Well the easy thing there is to just avoid color -- say her face darkened in embarasment. :p

    Lots of sentences starting with 'she'.

In fact, just about the only narrative paragraphs which don't
basically start with 'she' or 'her' are describing her brush.

I'll look afresh at it, but I don't think there's much I can
do about that.

    Well, it works as it is, in many senses. I wasn't positive if it was intentional or not.

    Claim that it is, and we'll call it even. ;)

She needs to personalize herself, to draw the reader into her
interior monolog, so the narrative has to be impersonal. It
loses its austerity if I use descriptive nouns as pronouns, in
fact those would draw the reader outside of her viewpoint to
watch her in real third-person, something I want to avoid
inviting them to do.

I can't use names, because she's in the middle of changing hers.
Finding them, in fact. Plus, that would, to a lesser extent,
also establish an additional camera position outside her eyes.
If I start changing that constant {she|her} start, I'll have to
go through the lot of them, otherwise the one or two exceptions
will stand out, distracting with spurious significance.

In your reading, is the repetition obtrusive, or just
something that was noticed?

    Merely noted. As I said above, it works as it is.

>Now she drew back from both men and women, reduced once more to
>virginity. But... what is a virgin?

    is -- was (?)

Is it disruptive? To my mind, 'is' here opens up better into the
stream of undemarced interior monolog than does 'was'. That's my
reading, though, having tried it both ways now. Does it make
your parser hiccup, or is it something your C&C-editor function
flagged?

    I only use software to check on Mr. Granberry's fics. :p State change = 0, etc...

    No, this is just my ego saying, "I don't write like that." So you should probably ignore it; after all, if we all wrote the same, there wouldn't be a need for an FFML.

>She paused in applying a deft stroke of barely visible color to
>the paper, to wipe her eyes with the back of her free hand. This
>line of thought was getting wet; she had thought she was past
>that.

    this -- that (?)

The intent here was to signal entry into the interior monolog by
adopting a slightly more present-tense expression, in the same
was as the above-discussed tense-exception is intended. Again,
is it disruptive, or merely noticeable, in your reading?

    This one was a tad more jarring, but it's qualified with the questionmark, which means if it's intentional (and it was!) then you should leave it.

    I miss a lot of the subtle things because I'm a particularly dense person. :p

    I'm not quite sure I understand about the thought getting wet,
though. I'm assured that I'm a particularly dense person, so that might
not mean anything. :p

The surface resonance is that the thought has brought her to
tears; this is why she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

Another resonance, but one which isn't apparent unless one is
familiar with the character from "Sosei" or is rereading the
story and looking for such, is the J-water and lock-water used
on her in the incident she's dwelling on. Both the dwelling on
the 'wetting' that made her female, and crying about the memory,
are responses she'd thought she'd gotten past.

    Ah. That makes ever so much more sense, now...

The third resonance for 'wetting' to which I first alluded near
the start is female sexual arousal, with a fresh pulse to the
resonation in the preceding paragraph with the virgin/rape
dichotomy, which some women find arousing in fantasy (ref: "My
Secret Garden"); since the rape is symbolic and no penetration
was even attempted, I suppose she could find the thought mildly
tittilating, though it's unlikely, but she's already crossed the
line into arousal (in two forms, one of which she has only in
memory now) within the first four paragraphs, so she'll be more
susceptible to restimulation by even mildly sexual thoughts for
awhile, such as a reversion to regarding her feminization from a
quasi-male awareness, which brings the male and female aspects
into forced intimacy within the self.

    Some day I plan on being smart enough to understand that. O_O

Another 'wetting' is the line of thought which is the
calligraphic stroke she is putting on the paper.

There's another resonance for 'wetting', that of being wounded
(and, further out-of-band, being invested with a hungry wound by
being made female), but I didn't manage to sustain that one very
well beyond getting the paper wounded by the brush. I guess its
passband was too far outside that of the chain of filter nodes
that I ended up hooking together. I couldn't find a way to
adjust the response to avoid damping it, with so few poles of
filtration. But then, this story is supposed to be a watercolor.

Dense? Pfui. you lost all rights to that claim with your
publication of I Am Become.... as if any such pretense was left
by the time you were done with Miss/Fortune.

    Well, that was a colaberative effort between Durandall and I (Miss/Fortune was my own), but... 'm learning. Slowly but surely.

    'putting' as a descriptive word doesn't seem to do this scene
justice. It seems to lack impact...

I see what you mean and I'm thinking about it. I can use it to
reinforce the 'wounding' resonance here even more if I'm careful
not to put too much color into it. In something as analog as
prose, though, the lower the component count, the tighter the
specs on those installed are likely to be... finding the right
word(s) will probably take a while. It has to attack both the
paper and the insect with her sword-of-water brush, in the
process of creating the insect, without ceasing to be water.
It must leave wounds on the insect; that's why the spots are
ruddy.

    Easily understandable.

    Same.

These are tricky, and I do see the lumpiness you point out.
I've pushed the first involved sentence up into the preceding
paragraph, thusly:

Her thoughts were getting discomforting again. She looked up from
the pad of paper bound to her easel and eyed those around her;
she realized that she was surrounded by the homeless.

...I'm still studying the second instance, trying to find a clean
way to lessen the jolt without adding to the wordcount or
reducing the number of allusory resonances.

    That's similar to the thought/dialogue separators I used in IaB, so I might be just a _little_ biased when I say... I like it. :p

    Missing newline?

    I very much like the line about the impure. Brings to mind the
process for forging a sword in a very subtle manner.

I suppose, to reinforce that analogy, I could replace 'cast'
with 'beat', but that's too percussive, and 'dross' is conspicuously
specific and thus in this context too distracting to be useful. 

    Better to leave it as is as a happy coincidence -- let scholars in later years flog themselves into a frezy trying to decipher it. ;)

>I am still being purified, then; and the only way to avoid being
>touched is to give way immediately. Have it your way, then, Lord
>Sosei.

    Missing newline?

In both places the missing newline was deliberate; I was working
for a closer association of the two paragraphs. Neither you nor
Don read it that way, so I put in extra newlines, reread it that
way, and decided that my meanings were intact that way, so...
adjusted in both places. thanks. guess I was being too clever by
half (half a paragraph break).

    It probably could have worked, Buty we're almost all just so used to a set scheme that breaking it confused us. Like happy little grammatical lemmings...

>Why not; irony is my only weapon lately. I am being blessed by
>the water, unburdened of everything I took for granted. I am
>being purified with therapy, too; the process is far from over,
>I can tell.

    Then too, finished blades are quenched in water...

I like your extra parallel. The only place where I deliberately
set it up was in iron-y being her only weapon, after harping on
her lack of a (male) weapon for awhile but for a brush. Perhaps
my subconscious was working overtime, or perhaps the acclaim
goes to you for building that resonance out of my words.

    For someone who claims to be a pacafist, I have an unhealthy interest in the actual process of forging weapons. Don't mind me. ^_^

>She smirked and gestured grandly at the bucket with the brush.
>"The water is my weal and my bane..." She stopped herself short
>and looked anxiously skyward, half-expecting lightning from the
>dirty sky, no longer sure she was immune to its thrust. The Los
>Angeles summer sky was static, cloudless and uninhabited, like a
>painted backdrop in a movie about itself. It seemed to her to
>have no depth. She turned back to her work.

    Hmmm...

I'm curious: what reaction is represented by this "hmmm"? (two
places, both to paragraphs specifying locale.)

    It's something that makes me think about things so hard that I forget what I was doing by the time I return to the message composer. >_<

>I thought I could study theatre, but it puts one into the art; I
>would have drowned there.

    I like this -- seperate paragraphs for first and third person
passages seems to help the flow a bit.

It was also a deliberate context-shift on her part, pushing
herself out of immediate intimacy with the job of painting a
rendition of a threatening fish.

    Ah...

    Should there be a comma after 'Water-colored'?

Stripped of its poetic pretensions, it is intended to say:

    Painted using water-colors in a barely-pigmented (water-thin) manner,

...a comma would break that, I think, because it would make the
two into separate descriptions rather than have the one
specifying the manner of the other.

    I use too many commas. I hit my head and slipped into a comma when I was young. ;p

Haiku of my lament:

Forgive my spelling,
my U.S. education,
is the source of blame.

That second comma brings out a second meaning, one which I have
seen enacted (and countered at home) in my elder son's
schooling. With the parenthetic statement elided, it's:

     Forgive my spelling, is the source of blame.
 
...implying that the US system should not have been so forgiving
in your formative years. Out of curiosity, is this deliberate?

    Uhh... yeah! Yeah! I knew that, really!

    Seriously though, it was meant in about that manner, but I'm a huge fan of double and triple meanings. I think there's note a single passage in IaB that means only one thing...

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to this
story. This one was another leap for me -- I was actually
writing at a more subtle level than I typically read -- and such
leaps can put one flat on one's face.

I am amazed and delighted at your response. I wasn't even sure
the story worked for anybody but me (I reread it at least 20
times once I was done, a sure sign that I like it, but then I
wrote it), that's why I asked Rakhal to preread it for me and
tell me if it was another clinker. He gave it a green light; I
posted it.

    No, it was a brilliant work. And you C&Ced my signature file, so that's gotta be worth something. :)

siaru