On Jun 9, 2006, at 7:09 PM, Richard Lawson wrote:

Just so ya know, I have no knowledge whatsoever of the anime, so I'll 
be
commenting from complete ignorance.

And I know I don't need to tell ya this, Nick, but just to be safe:  
all my
comments are always meant to be constructive.  You can cheerfully 
ignore
everything I say and that's fine.  You and I have slightly different
approaches to prose, as you well know.  I'll be commenting from my
perspective, of course, but you can always ignore that and just what 
the
perspective you feel comfortable with.

Occasionally one would deviate from formation, usually to pick up a 
rescue
pod; even
then, the actions were done in silence, with no word broadcast over 
the
general channel.

Aiyee!  Punctuation overload!

I'm in the process of editing all my old stories in preparation for 
putting
them back on my web site, and this is one of my biggest sins:  long,
complex, compound sentences that are awfully difficult for a reader to
parse.  I'd suggest breaking this sentence in two at the semi-colon.

Second Wave was well-prepared for, as they'd had 189 years to prepare.

The meal was well-cooked, since they'd had 189 years to cook it.

Slightly redundant there.  =)

Well... I wanted the redundancy there; however, it could have been 
phrased better, yes.

This few, this band of brothers, had faced the abyss and lived to tell
the tale - but, in some ways, they would never come home.

Just something to comment on, something I've been trying to do in my 
own
writing: try to avoid cliched phrases.  "band of brothers", "lived to 
tell
the tale" - all extremely well-worn literary phrases.  Try not relying 
on
them so much and developing your own terminology.  You're so very good 
at
it, Nick, that you shouldn't need to use crutches like these.

"'This... thing of darkness... I acknowledge mine.'  Shakespeare, The
Tempest."

Shakespeare, woot!

Heh, you complain and celebrate it at the same time.  :)

Seriously, this would make a lot more sense with a better understanding 
of the material - more specifically, the character.  Najima is the sort 
of person who would don a spacesuit and meditate on the outer surface 
of the space station while staring back at Earth.  For Christmas, she 
bought every Christmas tree star available at the station commissary, 
hung them up in her room, and prayed with the same words the angels 
sang at Christ's birth.  And yes, her use - almost overuse - of 
Shakespeare quotes in the series is canon.

He was, first and foremost, a teacher; for him, to face crowds
of men and women who hung on his every word (or, alternatively,
slept through his sermon) was second nature.  He'd taught
everything from Shakespeare to combat theory; no subject should
faze him at all - not even this one, a subject he'd had to teach
once before.

Two sentences that contain:  six commas, two semi-colons, two 
parentheses,
and a hyphen.  You're making your readers work too hard on parsing, in 
my
opinion.  Again, I acknowledge that this is a style choice on your 
part.
Just wanted to offer my viewpoint on the subject.

I'll need to think about this.  There are probably refinements that 
could be performed in this case.

To make matters worse, the only experts on the subject were
the subjects of the sermon itself.

The only cooks were the ones who would be cooking.

Hmmm.  Not quite.  The meaning is that the only experts on death are 
the dead.  Can you think of a better way of putting it so that the 
meaning goes through without being painfully direct?

my own mentor, James-sensei,

Just curious: canonical?  Or Zen-inspired.  =)

Richard James is head of Foundation Stellvia; first shows up in episode 
1 talking with Shima and Arisa, and makes regular appearances 
throughout the series.  About age 50-55 or so, gray hair, a bit 
heavyset, with a beard.

 A vision of a young girl in the bright orange of Stellvia's prep
uniform caught his mind.  Laughing blue eyes, deft fingers as she
played her guitar... soft, husky alto voice.

Nice.  I'm in love with her already.

Too bad she's dead...

even regular students would give the uniform pause.

Er, that doesn't sound right.  You're making it seem like the uniform 
is
scared of the students.

Took me a minute to figure this out; I see what you mean here.

And she would enjoy every minute of hearing them.

Wow, lots and lots of setup going on here. You are doing a good job of
establishing your characters.  My only objection so far is that 
there's a
kind of sameness to them all, that I don't find anything unique about 
them.
It's like the same character, just in different situations.  (I say 
this
only because I'm rewriting "Thy Inward Love" and it's suffering the 
same
problem; all of my characters sound *exactly* the same.  When Ranma and
Nabiki start talking the same way, you know you're doing something 
wrong.)

I guess the best way to illustrate this is the concept of 
self-selection.  If you have a dozen people who all write anime fanfic, 
what is the probability that they're going to hate anime?  Pretty much 
zero.  If you go out to risk life and limb to become a space pilot, 
then there's probably some pretty hard motivation to do so.

Also, this is part of what I wanted to show.  What drives these people? 
  What do they feel; what will motivate them as they go beyond the 
crises in the series?

The teapot was automatically filling; Shima had programmed the pot
to automatically fill upon her entry, a small favor for which she
was grateful each night.

The backups were automatically running because she had programmed the
backups to automatically run.

Another day, another dollar.

Bleh.  Cliche.

It's a bleh cliche because it's a bleh situation.  Overwork is not fun.

Finishing construction of the new Stellvia had been her second job
for the past one-and-a-half years, now; while it would be another
year before it was complete (and another decade before all six
Foundations were complete), it was at least finished enough to be
operational, as of six months ago.

<Richard's CPU overheats and shuts down>

Would you believe that's all *one sentence*?  I actually had to read it
three times to parse it correctly.

Yeah... that might be too much.

She poured a cup of tea for herself and savored the aroma; she wasn't
sure exactly what Shima had done to make it taste so good (one of her
mother's tricks, she always said), but it was the perfect way to 
unwind
after a hard day.  She closed her eyes after the first sip; a day of
classes and homework followed by evenings manipulating multiple 
Biancas
at once tended to leave her wishing for blindness, and it felt good to
just not see anything for a little while.

At least this is two sentences.  Still, unnecesarily complex in my 
opinion.

Some yes, some no.  I think the parenthesis contents could probably go, 
for instance; however, the reaction to the work, especially considering 
that piloting systems in this series have direct-optic-nerve feeds, I 
want to keep.  I'll need to look at it to see what needs to be changed.

The gentle eyes and soft smile she'd always thought of as the 
byproduct
of a quiet, contempative soul; as he sat with only the kitchen light 
to
illuminate them, she noticed just how tired he was.

This sentence just doesn't compute.  If I'm understanding it 
correctly, the
light is illuminating James's eyes and smile, and Shima is noticing how
tired he is.  One thing about semi-colons: the part before and after 
the
semi-colon should be complete phrases.  "The gentle eyes" part isn't a
complete sentence and is difficult to match up with the part after the
semi-colon.

This is what I get for multitasking: writing this, reading papers for 
school, watching TV, playing Civ4, and talking on irc can leave me 
distracted.  :)

As long as I get some each night, I'm not complaining."

Bow-chicka-bow-bow

(sorry, couldn't resist)

This was one of those lines that, after I wrote it, I realized the 
potential connotations it could have.  I figured that if Lucas could 
get away with "Size matters not", then I could get away with this.

Earth receded from the port window's view, a brilliant bluish-white
marble in the emptiness of space.

Her eyes turned to the infinite of space.

So how many "...of space" descriptions are we going to be using?  =)

"...the vastness of space."

"...the deepness of space."

"...look, space is big.  Really, really big.  I mean, you might think 
the
trip down to the chemist and back is big, but that's nothing compared 
to
space."

Oh, a few more... ;p

She felt the tears coming; she didn't even try to hold them back
as the ship made its way through the emptiness.

...of space?

All ribbing aside, you're using the same descriptions over and over 
again.

How many ways can you describe nothing?

He never quite understood why people always said that space was empty

As oppossed to being infinite?

the void of space

She always asked him about the wetness of water...

heh.

With himself alone, he could find lies in space; he could be fooled by
what he felt.  With her beside him, with her heart and mind and 
soul...
there was only truth.

Nice.

Is that it?  Er, what's the plot, exactly?

Is this just supposed to be a kind of beginning, like describing who 
all the
Sailor Senshi were before they met up?

Peter Beagle once said that "There are no happy endings, for nothing 
ever ends"; this falls in that category, as an ending leads to another 
beginning.  The space technology in the series is largely built up out 
of necessity to deal with the approach of stellar matter from a nearby 
supernova; after humanity survives this task and several others, what 
is left for space is exploration - to go out to the stars.

It's a nice series of character vignettes, the kind of stuff you're 
great
at, Nick.  You've got me interested in what kind of anime this is, 
which is
good.  Very evocative prose, as always.

Glad to see you writing again.  =)

Thanks.

-Richard

-- Nick


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