[American Magic] Lost Twins (short-chapter version)

[Arakawa]

This is a project I've been working on for quite a while (see this older thread for some context), about a magician who works at the New York Subway Lost Property Office, and her naive apprentice. 'Lost Twins' is a fairly moderately short fic that introduces the characters and tells of how they met. If this turns out to work, I have ideas for other stories which should hopefully be more straightforward to write.

Primary Characters in This Story

• Simon Molloy - a seventeen-year-old financial services intern (long story) who took the job thinking that he would see a glimpse of some kind of hidden world of financial affairs, but instead found people engaged in the fairly boring and meaningless pursuit of money. Going home on the subway one evening, he picks up a strange notebook dropped by a mysterious old man and tries to return it to the lost and found, plunging himself straight into the middle of a sinister and inscrutable plot operating in New York's magical underworld.
• Drake Powell - a magician who apparently possesses the secret of eternal youth; dubiously claims to be the 'best magician in North America', actual evidence for the claim is... inconclusive, given that she holds a largely menial job as head of the Hazardous Materials Division in the New York Subway's Lost Property Office. 'Hazardous Materials', of course, is largely code for magical artefacts that are sometimes dropped on the trains, and cause an entire headache of their own to deal with.

My primary source of uncertainty this time around is how to divide the chapters; for now, I will be posting short sections of around ~6,000 words that I hope to glom together into three large chapters once the fic is done. (Thus the sections are numbered 1a, 1b, 1c and so forth....)



Chapters So Far

• Prologue - an inscrutable old man
• Chapter 1a - a lost notebook
• Chapter 1b - a nameless genie (version 2)
• Chapter 1c - an intimidating warehouse (TODO)
• Chapter 1d - a very large troll (TODO)

[Arakawa]

This is my initial version of the prologue for the story. (People who have been following the earlier process will note that I made many earlier versions, but this is the first one I'm actually satisfied with. The dynamics of the encounter between these characters have been changed significantly.)

Edit: minor tweaks (not enough to bother marking a separate new version). Tweaked a bit of magician's reaction and added some window dressing describing what the old man notices in his eyes.

[Arakawa]

And this is the first part of what will be Chapter 1. One interesting question is whether this section works sufficiently well to hook people in to the story; if not, then events might be taking a little too long to develop, regardless of whether I put an actual chapter break here or later.

Edit: minor tweaks, including:

• tentatively added a header quote from 'Chomei at Toyama'. Not sure how well it'll fit, and I have a bunch of other possible quotes to use, but this is the one that satisfies me most at the moment.
• based on JonBob's feedback, added a paragraph lampshading Simon's lack of a 'freak out' reaction, and why it doesn't make particular sense to him

[Muphrid]

Hooray, we have content!

Prologue and chapter one:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Plot and structure

I can't really fathom why the magician should admit so freely that he's cursed; saying he's a financial magician is one thing, but being so explicit about a curse, about things that are not normal seems very off, like that should be kept secret.  Further, I wonder if it really serves a purpose to know beforehand that he's cursed; if we hadn't known and he didn't say why he was so intent on getting off the train, it might be more engaging to try to figure out why he's so upset.

On the other hand, having him admit to it allows the old man to continue making a point about the reckless use of magic and power.  And you do keep the surprise of the old man's nature intact.

The prologue has convinced us of the reality of magic and the sinister perception of humanity on behalf of the old man, but judging just on that I probably have no idea where this story is going.

In the second paragraph of chapter 1, we finally get the idea that the narrator is a character in the story.  To be honest, I'm not sure if people will be surprised by this or just go with it; the narration is flowery and wordy, enough that thinking a real person talks like this could be a bit of a shock.

One thing I'm concerned about is how "magical" or coincidental our narrator's entrance into the New York financial markets seems to be.  Because he questions it and is mystified by it, I feel the reader must naturally think about it to, testing it against suspension of disbelief.  I'm not sure this is a good time for the reader to be doing that, but portraying our narrator as bewildered and out of his element is probably more important, so there may be nothing to do about it here.

To answer this action required a more nuanced means of expression than just my voice, so once again I took out my laptop.

This strikes me as a bit of a slow action to me. This was 2012, right?  Maybe give Simon a tablet?


Frankly, it strikes me as a bit coincidental that Simon runs into Powell like this.

Characterization and development

The initial characterizations of the old man and the magician are detailed, almost overly detailed, but since we're scrambling to get a picture of them into our heads at the start, I don't think this is troubling.  Right away, you succeed in differentiating them.

This point the old man makes about honorable defeats vs. dishonorable gains seems a bit abstract, to be honest.  Sure, with the stock market you can picture someone either taking insider information to make money or refusing it and standing the risk of losing money, but that's a very clear-cut case.  The greater point he's trying to make is not yet clear; perhaps it shouldn't be, but that's my reaction to it.  It does succeed, however, in painting the old man as having already judged the majority of people and having formed deep-seated opinions about the nature of humanity.


The opening paragraphs of chapter one help establish our narrator as a character, and I quite like the depth you give him, the background, the history.  You've gone to great pains to make his unusual writing style seem believable, that it can naturally come from a person of his background.


The description of Powell as looking so young kinda struck me as being potentially misleading; I know well enough that she is not the age she looks, but someone who doesn't pick up on the clues about the Fifties or the bottle might think of her as more of a peer for Simon at first, at least until she demonstrates her deeper expertise.

Style and command

"Magic," the man with the impressive-looking briefcase was saying, "is no big deal. It is merely 'the incomprehensible principles that govern all reality, made visible,' as my old mentor liked to say."

Agreement: "It is merely...principles..."  Perhaps you want to say a collection of principles, etc.


To be honest, I remain a bit mystified over the narration being "in" the magician's head, knowing that later on it's likely to be in Simon's head.  Or perhaps this is a different narrator altogether, just for the prologue.

Misc

Ah! for not only talented magicians, but many ordinary folk as well, may perform both large and small wonders; yet they are drawn ever onwards and upwards, by what law of nature I know not, each to find out and complete their life's ultimate working. It is the final sun, in the light of which all their prior struggles and crafts are to be valued or disdained; and all too often, when it rises, it is a bleak and barbarous sun, and all too often not even that, but merely a sort of electric light-bulb, a dim and spare mockery of the order of Heaven.

I must confess I can only guess what is being said here: that people tend to value forward progress toward some goal and devalue what they achieve on the way, only to find the net result pretty sucky and a mockery of things with real value?

For if you don't bias yourself towards fairy-tales, but read them mixed judiciously with all kinds of other books, and don't feel the need to finish a book when it becomes tedious, nor read the chapters in any kind of sensible order, and if you (shamefully) ignore the common prejudices towards proper bed-time... well, soon enough I found myself learning all kinds of things that most other people seemed to consider boring and difficult, such as Mathematics, or Computer Programming.

Do these subjects really need to be capitalized?

"Is it 'take your kids to work day' today, or something?" someone might very well ask on the way up.

Oh, someone is actually saying this, not just hypothetically.

Overall impressions:

Plot and structure:  I think you were right to be concerned about the structure and breaking up of this chapter.  There isn't really a "wham, you're in a world with magic" type of moment, especially the way it's constructed.  I can think of a few alternatives, but I won't say they're clearly superior; rather, they just go about things differently.  For instance, I can imagine starting with Simon on the train, picking up the notebook, and the notebook is somehow removed from him yet magically ends up back in his pocket.  That strikes me as a short, quick scene that would rapidly establish that something supernatural is afoot without giving away as much as you do.

On the other hand, such an approach would lose something you have now: an immediate sense of the depth of the world and how magic permeates it.

You could consider instead stopping right after Simon finds the notebook back in his pocket.  I think for that, Powell would need to have a different attitude, perhaps as part of trying to convince Simon of the otherworldliness of this happening.  She could tell him he must be trying to pull some prank on her, that he must not be Simon Molloy and is just trying to have this object passed around through the LPO to get money into someone's hands, etc.  The only other explanation would be something supernatural going on, and no one would believe that unless the notebook just happens to go back to Simon's pocket.  That could be the moment it all finally clicks for Simon.  Then the train ride could be the start of the next chapter, just showing how deep the rabbit hole goes, so to speak.

The piece does feel a bit slow.  We're what, 10000 words in, and we have no idea what this notebook is all about?  Slow starts aren't a crime; just concerned that people are gonna wonder why they should continue reading the piece.  There's a sense of magic being commonplace and everywhere, which doesn't lend itself to wonder and awe.  There's no hint of the threat that (if you haven't changed things around since I last remembered) will ultimately come.  Right now, at the end of one chapter, we don't even really know where the plot will go.  This reflects the characters' ignorance also, but still, it's something I notice.

Characterization and development: You do a good job at detailing characters and giving them some quirks, which helps make them feel real.  Each one--from the old man to the financial magician to Simon to Powell--is unique and carries a distinctive voice about them (no pun intended for Simon).

Style and command: This is the thing that gives me the most pause.  The style for this piece is very distinctive, particularly through Simon's narration.  It's not as wordy or as jarring as I remember it, though.  Again, the big thing that gets me is the apparent shift in narrator between the prologue and the first chapter (an alternative would be for Simon to recount that he has no first-hand recollection of these events, despite having been there, but he's managed to reconstruct what happened through various means).

The way you talk about Powell's habits and such makes me think this piece is best told as if in retrospective: a much older Simon thinking back on his past experiences.  I like the idea of such a separation between Simon in the story and Simon the narrator that would result, but it may also distance the reader from the piece.

Theme: Knowing a little bit about what you've planned, I know that the old man is probably the main driving force behind any theme you have in mind.  As I said earlier, it's not apparent how to turn his rants and diatribes into a clear-cut set of goals and motivations.  Perhaps it doesn't need to be all that apparent at this stage; being too clear would make the story uninteresting and transparent.

[Arakawa]

Thanks for this commentary, it was very much worth the wait :D

Spoiler: ShowHide

Plot and structure

I can't really fathom why the magician should admit so freely that he's cursed; saying he's a financial magician is one thing, but being so explicit about a curse, about things that are not normal seems very off, like that should be kept secret.  Further, I wonder if it really serves a purpose to know beforehand that he's cursed; if we hadn't known and he didn't say why he was so intent on getting off the train, it might be more engaging to try to figure out why he's so upset.

I think my priority in this scene is that the magician and the ghost coincidentally both vanish for entirely unrelated reasons, and I need to establish as much separation as I can between these reasons. (If they both vanish without warning, the reader would apply Occam's Razor and naturally assume the same mechanism did it for both of them.)

The problem is that monstrously unlikely coincidences like this are an actual in-world phenomenon with a specific reason behind them; until I unravel that reason, I have to carefully and gently ram a small number of these events down the reader's throat. If the main tradeoff for this one is that the magician comes across as too candid, that's an acceptable tradeoff. He doesn't have much good sense anyways, so it fits.

(This is the last time that he appears in this story, but I have the option of bringing him back later.)

The prologue has convinced us of the reality of magic and the sinister perception of humanity on behalf of the old man, but judging just on that I probably have no idea where this story is going.

When things become clearer, we'll see if I can or should go back and add more give-aways, or if the pace at which things are revealed is fine.

One thing I'm concerned about is how "magical" or coincidental our narrator's entrance into the New York financial markets seems to be.  Because he questions it and is mystified by it, I feel the reader must naturally think about it to, testing it against suspension of disbelief.  I'm not sure this is a good time for the reader to be doing that, but portraying our narrator as bewildered and out of his element is probably more important, so there may be nothing to do about it here.

To some extent, it might be a good thing to question situations like this in general, and for the reader to question this one in particular and realize that Simon was jumping into it a bit blindly. As I mentioned, I received a similar interview offer waybackwhen, and unlike Simon I was far too suspicious about the company's motives to even follow up on it.

I'm not sure that this is the way you took this scene, though, or whether I should do anything to fix the impression.

This strikes me as a bit of a slow action to me. This was 2012, right?  Maybe give Simon a tablet?

As we discussed on IRC, Simon has a several-year-old Thinkpad with Fedora on it and a lot of practice using it. I should add an adjective at some point that suggests the age of the machine, then. He hasn't felt the need to upgrade just yet, especially since styli accessories for something like an iPad or Android tablet have been fairly awkward to use until very recently -- and Simon is a bit restrained in terms of splurging on cutting-edge tech toys.

Frankly, it strikes me as a bit coincidental that Simon runs into Powell like this.

This is artificial coincidence number two. I'm not 100% sure if I'll need a coincidence #3 or not in this story, but if it happens Simon will probably be too preoccupied with other things for it to be as obvious.

This point the old man makes about honorable defeats vs. dishonorable gains seems a bit abstract, to be honest.  Sure, with the stock market you can picture someone either taking insider information to make money or refusing it and standing the risk of losing money, but that's a very clear-cut case.  The greater point he's trying to make is not yet clear; perhaps it shouldn't be, but that's my reaction to it.  It does succeed, however, in painting the old man as having already judged the majority of people and having formed deep-seated opinions about the nature of humanity.

I guess this paragraph can be called Literary Gibberish #1 for how abstract it is. But as far as I understand it, this is actually an all-encompassing dig against modern capitalism. (Which relies heavily on the profit motive -- what the old man calls avarice -- as the primary criterion. There is no honorable way to run a joint-stock company at a loss, for instance: you are then a failure as a capitalist by definition and that's all there is to it. And since New York is an entirely financial city, the old man feels an intractable enmity to it.) I'm not sure how actually valid this is. I think the thing about the old man is, being a ghost he is not entirely sane, more like a solidified bundle of regret and anger with nothing to ground it*. Thus his justifications for what he does are consistent from minute to minute, but a bit petty and right-brained.

(*) Living people are a lot more mellow, since they need to keep their feet on the ground and constantly pause from whatever ideology they're stewing in to worry about mundane and ordinary things such as sleep and hunger... makes negative emotions more difficult to dwell on.

Ah! for not only talented magicians, but many ordinary folk as well, may perform both large and small wonders; yet they are drawn ever onwards and upwards, by what law of nature I know not, each to find out and complete their life's ultimate working. It is the final sun, in the light of which all their prior struggles and crafts are to be valued or disdained; and all too often, when it rises, it is a bleak and barbarous sun, and all too often not even that, but merely a sort of electric light-bulb, a dim and spare mockery of the order of Heaven.

I must confess I can only guess what is being said here: that people tend to value forward progress toward some goal and devalue what they achieve on the way, only to find the net result pretty sucky and a mockery of things with real value?

I guess that makes this paragraph Literary Gibberish #2. I was half-asleep and thinking the story over when I came up with this paragraph, which seemed to correspond to some of the later themes in the setting. Translating it from omniscient!Simon!narration, I think it means that the value of all your learning, hard work, and accomplishment becomes worse than worthless if all it accomplishes in the end is something trivial or destructive. Your interpretation is also interesting, though, and quite valid given that people often don't pick very good goals to rush towards; they would indeed accomplish a lot more in the long run if they slowed down and enjoyed the scenery.

So it seems like a tolerably many-sided thought.

Literary Gibberish #3 would then be the 'alpha train' paragraph at the top of Chapter 1, but I'm kind of attached to it and I haven't heard any complaints. It sounds good and sets the mood somewhat, even if it's not too clear who the workers it's talking about are. (In point of fact, these are a sufficiently peripheral group of Goblins that they have to cross sunlight to get from their caves to the subway line.)

The description of Powell as looking so young kinda struck me as being potentially misleading; I know well enough that she is not the age she looks, but someone who doesn't pick up on the clues about the Fifties or the bottle might think of her as more of a peer for Simon at first, at least until she demonstrates her deeper expertise.

Yep. She lampshades her age much more explicitly for Simon's benefit at a later point in the story, but for now this is a small bit of a problem. It is also a problem Powell faces in-universe, given that she has to regularly convince people she deals with that she's a functional adult, without wanting to constantly announce her immortality (she has a reputation... of sorts... inside the magical world, but not outside of it, obviously). Powell's solution when she has trouble is just to behave forcefully until people get the basic idea. She actually has to apply Mesmerism(*) to Simon in this scene to get him on the train, though he's too ignorant to realize what she's doing. I was going to also work an explicit mention of Mesmerism into the prologue, to allow the attentive reader to notice this fact anyways, but that didn't pan out.

(* Mesmerism isn't anything particularly spooky; it can be thought of as a souped-up version of the misdirection real-world stage magicians use in their tricks. Thus it provides a limited way to draw people's attention to something, or draw their attention away from something, as long as they're not carefully paying attention to whether or not someone is using mesmerism on them, and so forth... Powell gives a demonstration of it later.)

"Magic," the man with the impressive-looking briefcase was saying, "is no big deal. It is merely 'the incomprehensible principles that govern all reality, made visible,' as my old mentor liked to say."

Agreement: "It is merely...principles..."  Perhaps you want to say a collection of principles, etc.

Is this really as hokey as you say? I don't mind it, and people in real life don't always talk with grammatically perfect utterances. The way it is right now has the feel of a bad advertising slogan to me, which is about accurate. But I might be missing something major about how it sounds.

I haven't decided if this magician's old mentor is going to be Powell or someone else (anyone who's serious about teaching winds up teaching a number of dull students over the years, so Powell isn't right out), but this feels a lot like a catastrophically misunderstood paraphrase of something Powell or a similarly shrewd magician might say.

Misc

For if you don't bias yourself towards fairy-tales, but read them mixed judiciously with all kinds of other books, and don't feel the need to finish a book when it becomes tedious, nor read the chapters in any kind of sensible order, and if you (shamefully) ignore the common prejudices towards proper bed-time... well, soon enough I found myself learning all kinds of things that most other people seemed to consider boring and difficult, such as Mathematics, or Computer Programming.

Do these subjects really need to be capitalized?

Dang, guess so. I actually removed a lot of such capitalization relative to earlier drafts. For some reason my style for this piece sometimes comes out like a bad imitation of Herman Melville, and I have to tone that aspect of it down since it's basically an obsolete and obnoxious writing style that incidentally guaranteed total obscurity for Melville back in the day :-/

(Now that Melville is long dead, they cram Moby Dick down everyone's throat in high school. The irony of fate....)

At least Melville's American, though. The other stylistic awful I have to keep watching for like a hawk is too much Britishness creeping in by way of the obvious Harry Potter influences, which doesn't fit here at all.

"Is it 'take your kids to work day' today, or something?" someone might very well ask on the way up.

Oh, someone is actually saying this, not just hypothetically.

Okay, that's a last minute edit that didn't pan out. I'll just put the quote without explication, like in earlier versions of the scene:

"Is it 'take your kids to work day' today, or something?"

I guess if this were a movie, this would simply be a bit where the movie cuts from Simon's voiceover narration to a scene of people talking in the elevator.

Plot and structure:  I think you were right to be concerned about the structure and breaking up of this chapter.  There isn't really a "wham, you're in a world with magic" type of moment, especially the way it's constructed.

Hmm. I'd have thought a train full of goblins would be a hint that something's odd, but I guess from how much magic gets mentioned in the earlier omniscient narration, and from the magic-related metaphors Simon uses to talk about the internship, when more magic pops up it's less striking for the reader than it is for Simon.

For instance, I can imagine starting with Simon on the train, picking up the notebook, and the notebook is somehow removed from him yet magically ends up back in his pocket.  That strikes me as a short, quick scene that would rapidly establish that something supernatural is afoot without giving away as much as you do.

Hmm. The way I could see this happening in reality is that Simon tosses the notebook into a lost and found slot (which would be operational), and then finds it back in his pocket minutes later. Then Powell pops up to explain things to him. In some ways, it's a more natural series of events (Powell doesn't have to push against Simon's skepticism as much), but it would actually take longer to develop, though, than what happens here....

You could consider instead stopping right after Simon finds the notebook back in his pocket.  I think for that, Powell would need to have a different attitude, perhaps as part of trying to convince Simon of the otherworldliness of this happening.  She could tell him he must be trying to pull some prank on her, that he must not be Simon Molloy and is just trying to have this object passed around through the LPO to get money into someone's hands, etc.  The only other explanation would be something supernatural going on, and no one would believe that unless the notebook just happens to go back to Simon's pocket.  That could be the moment it all finally clicks for Simon.  Then the train ride could be the start of the next chapter, just showing how deep the rabbit hole goes, so to speak.

Okay, those are neat ideas; though they either don't fit with Powell's knowledge and motivations, or they make a hash of chronological order. I have enough complicated stuff happening here, I think, without messing up the order of events with flashbacks.

The piece does feel a bit slow.  We're what, 10000 words in, and we have no idea what this notebook is all about?  Slow starts aren't a crime; just concerned that people are gonna wonder why they should continue reading the piece.  There's a sense of magic being commonplace and everywhere, which doesn't lend itself to wonder and awe.  There's no hint of the threat that (if you haven't changed things around since I last remembered) will ultimately come.  Right now, at the end of one chapter, we don't even really know where the plot will go.  This reflects the characters' ignorance also, but still, it's something I notice.

Other people on IRC told me not to worry about slow beginnings, so I didn't worry as much. We'll see if they were right about this, I guess.

* Arakawa walks off to press-gang alethiophile into looking at this story, given that he was the guy (I think?) who reassured me about this issue.

Characterization and development: You do a good job at detailing characters and giving them some quirks, which helps make them feel real.  Each one--from the old man to the financial magician to Simon to Powell--is unique and carries a distinctive voice about them (no pun intended for Simon).

As I mentioned before, I just hope they sound sufficiently American....

Style and command: This is the thing that gives me the most pause.  The style for this piece is very distinctive, particularly through Simon's narration.  It's not as wordy or as jarring as I remember it, though.  Again, the big thing that gets me is the apparent shift in narrator between the prologue and the first chapter (an alternative would be for Simon to recount that he has no first-hand recollection of these events, despite having been there, but he's managed to reconstruct what happened through various means).

Yep. The fact that I needed omniscient narration for the prologue is what drove the decision to make it a separate prologue in the first place. Likewise for a scene I posted earlier with the old man at the convenience store, which at least has a section separator in front of it. I think Simon's total absence from those scenes should be enough hint that this is a bit of a narrative shift going on.

I have another bit of omniscient narration I'm tempted to include near the end that elucidates things about Powell a bit more, but I might have to cut it entirely. My only way to actually keep it would have to format the scene in question in highly intrusive italics, to make it obvious that this is an interpolation into Simon's non-omniscient retelling of events, so I'm not sure if that would be worthwhile. Still thinking about it.

The way you talk about Powell's habits and such makes me think this piece is best told as if in retrospective: a much older Simon thinking back on his past experiences.  I like the idea of such a separation between Simon in the story and Simon the narrator that would result, but it may also distance the reader from the piece.

That's another way to think of the narration, that has the advantage of being more unified among the sections.

Theme: Knowing a little bit about what you've planned, I know that the old man is probably the main driving force behind any theme you have in mind.  As I said earlier, it's not apparent how to turn his rants and diatribes into a clear-cut set of goals and motivations.  Perhaps it doesn't need to be all that apparent at this stage; being too clear would make the story uninteresting and transparent.

As I said, it's always possible to go back to this section later and make his allusions more explicit if it seems necessary.

[Muphrid]

Spoiler: ShowHide

"Magic," the man with the impressive-looking briefcase was saying, "is no big deal. It is merely 'the incomprehensible principles that govern all reality, made visible,' as my old mentor liked to say."

Is this really as hokey as you say? I don't mind it, and people in real life don't always talk with grammatically perfect utterances. The way it is right now has the feel of a bad advertising slogan to me, which is about accurate. But I might be missing something major about how it sounds.

It's not a big deal if you prefer how it sounds as-is.

At least Melville's American, though. The other stylistic awful I have to keep watching for like a hawk is too much Britishness creeping in by way of the obvious Harry Potter influences, which doesn't fit here at all.

It may just be a cultural thing.  I still have a relentless problem that Simon sounds British to me in my head (even though the constructions and such don't strike me as so), and if I try to make Powell's voice fit her image in my head, she starts sounding British, too.

Plot and structure:  I think you were right to be concerned about the structure and breaking up of this chapter.  There isn't really a "wham, you're in a world with magic" type of moment, especially the way it's constructed.

Hmm. I'd have thought a train full of goblins would be a hint that something's odd, but I guess from how much magic gets mentioned in the earlier omniscient narration, and from the magic-related metaphors Simon uses to talk about the internship, when more magic pops up it's less striking for the reader than it is for Simon.

Yeah, it could be that, knowing this was a piece predicated on magic being real and such (and just how deep that goes, that Powell is involved, etc.) I just can't give a good bead on how this all fits together to an unknowing reader.  I realize now that seeing those goblins is the first real concrete proof Simon has encountered of something extraordinary, as well as that Powell is knee-deep in that world.  So it is a big deal, in that sense.

As I mentioned before, I just hope they sound sufficiently American....

I dunno, I think you may be worried about this too much.  In a purely textual medium, I can hardly tell the difference between other people I know from Canada and other Americans, aside from spelling differences.  At the least, there's little that comes to mind as being able to instantly distinguish the two.  What I notice in people from the UK is the tendency to use plural verbs for collective nouns (this may be a bad example, but something like, "The team are coming on the pitch" vs. "The team is taking the field"?)  But I haven't noticed if Canadians are more American or more British in that respect.  You probably know.

Yep. The fact that I needed omniscient narration for the prologue is what drove the decision to make it a separate prologue in the first place. Likewise for a scene I posted earlier with the old man at the convenience store, which at least has a section separator in front of it. I think Simon's total absence from those scenes should be enough hint that this is a bit of a narrative shift going on.

I have another bit of omniscient narration I'm tempted to include near the end that elucidates things about Powell a bit more, but I might have to cut it entirely. My only way to actually keep it would have to format the scene in question in highly intrusive italics, to make it obvious that this is an interpolation into Simon's non-omniscient retelling of events, so I'm not sure if that would be worthwhile. Still thinking about it.

Yeah, I would avoid a massive block of italics; my attitude toward that nowadays is that large swaths just let you get away with not adequately saying what's meant.

[Arakawa]

... and if I try to make Powell's voice fit her image in my head, she starts sounding British, too.

Huh. To be honest, I was actually picturing Powell with something of a Boston accent, but I have no idea how to actually convey that in writing (knowing mostly just the general sound and not any specific mannerisms/turns of phrase). If you know of a good source for a story with an overtly Bostonian character, that might be neat to take a look at (even if that just shows my idea of her accent is unworkable).

This is complicated by the fact that the only New England writer I can think of right now, HP Lovecraft, writes stories that feel fairly British to me, and would have still been writing around the time Powell was growing up. (But that Britishness could be a factor of Lovecraft's addiction to purple prose, something that shouldn't be an issue with Powell....) Though if that trend bears out over other Bostonian writers I look at from the same time period, then I guess they don't call it New England for nothing....

What other writers do I know off the top of my head from Massachusetts? Poe? Way too early.... seriously, there needs to be some kind of searchable database of writers by time period and place of origin and preferred alcoholic drink and all kinds of trivia like that....

... realize now that seeing those goblins is the first real concrete proof Simon has encountered of something extraordinary, as well as that Powell is knee-deep in that world.  So it is a big deal, in that sense.

I'd say 'neck-deep', but that'll certainly be established later... I guess the "wham" aspect of this scene is toned down by the fact that Simon tries so hard, and partly succeeds at, taking the whole thing in stride. In some ways he doesn't have that many options in terms of overtly freaking out, not when talking isn't a free action for him...

Yeah, I would avoid a massive block of italics; my attitude toward that nowadays is that large swaths just let you get away with not adequately saying what's meant.

>_>;; I'll also have to think about what to do about the upcoming convenience store scene, then, which has a block-of-italics that *definitely* needs to be there in one form or another. That scene is omniscient in the first place, so there it'll be more an issue of choosing a different kind formatting, rather than correcting PoV abuse.

[Muphrid]

Huh. To be honest, I was actually picturing Powell with something of a Boston accent, but I have no idea how to actually convey that in writing (knowing mostly just the general sound and not any specific mannerisms/turns of phrase). If you know of a good source for a story with an overtly Bostonian character, that might be neat to take a look at (even if that just shows my idea of her accent is unworkable).

This is complicated by the fact that the only New England writer I can think of right now, HP Lovecraft, writes stories that feel fairly British to me, and would have still been writing around the time Powell was growing up. (But that Britishness could be a factor of Lovecraft's addiction to purple prose, something that shouldn't be an issue with Powell....) Though if that trend bears out over other Bostonian writers I look at from the same time period, then I guess they don't call it New England for nothing....

What other writers do I know off the top of my head from Massachusetts? Poe? Way too early.... seriously, there needs to be some kind of searchable database of writers by time period and place of origin and preferred alcoholic drink and all kinds of trivia like that....

I can't think of anyone from Massachusetts specifically; I know King is from Maine, so that would at least be in the ballpark, but that's about all. As for my trouble with catching her accent and hearing it right in my head, I wouldn't worry about it. Most of the time I really hear her as sounding like a mature woman from the 1920s (the smoking adds to that image), which just has the problem of not jiving with the image of her, but does jive with her attitude a bit more.  Really, you could have five people read it and hear her five different ways; I don't know how to solve that problem.  Might just come with the territory.

>_>;; I'll also have to think about what to do about the upcoming convenience store scene, then, which has a block-of-italics that *definitely* needs to be there in one form or another. That scene is omniscient in the first place, so there it'll be more an issue of choosing a different kind formatting, rather than correcting PoV abuse.

Something I've seen is using a different, but otherwise ordinary, font.  Might get the idea across without being as hard on the eyes (which is my big concern about long swaths of italics; I feel like it actually gets irritating to read after a while).

[Arakawa]

Attached is the second part of Chapter 1, in a somewhat more rough state than the previous section.

Turns out, what I thought would be the first chapter is going to be split into four parts rather than three, due to the impossibility of covering so much ground in quite as many words as I'd thought. Putting the dialogue in order, I discovered a bit of drama I'd overlooked, that makes for a nice place to put a section break. Perhaps 1a and 1b would make a passable chapter 1 in the final version, resulting in a fic that's 4 chapters + prologue overall; though it's not really a cliffhanger, with the end of this section we see a definite dilemma establish itself (not the same one as Simon faces by the end), and that gives some considerable idea of what's supposed to make the world described here interesting.

There may be problems with the sheer amount of exposition and people talking, and with the sheer depth of the arcana that Powell tries to cover involving spiritual beings, in relatively few words. But then again, this fic isn't really trying to be Harry Potter, either, in terms of how the pacing and worldbuilding are handled. How to handle this aspect of the world (there is a LOT of potential depth to get lost in, certainly far more than is discussed here) is something I could definitely use some feedback to help recalibrate.

_{Fair warning: I'm going on a camping trip without Internet starting tomorrow afternoon, so I unless a feral wireless hotspot ambushes me in the bushes near Lake Huron, I'll most likely only be able to see and reply to any feedback on Monday.}

Edit: added a newer revision below, all further comments should be directed to that one.

[JonBob]

Some flow/wording issues:

Spoiler: ShowHide

In reality, it felt more like someone's clean but neglected garage or basement, writ large.

Don't think I've encountered "writ large" ever before. Maybe "only larger"?

seemed to be given special pride of place

"place of pride"?

She looked more nervous of me than I was of her, somehow, thought not in an unfriendly way.

"though" - also, how does one look nervous in an (un)friendly way? I can imagine it, but mostly it would be "nervous" by itself.

I on my part realized suddenly and in great detail that I was in fact holding her bridal-style, nearly dropped her, then figured out how to let her down to the floor in a gentle-enough fashion, then composed myself in an attempt to wipe from my memory the precise nature of the soft sensation of cradling her shoulder like that.

a bit run-on

requires for someone to deliberately transport, with the utmost care, and then deliberately drop an almost-priceless genie on a train... can you imagine what sort of reason someone might have for doing that?

"requires someone to deliberately..."

my sense of honour said I shouldn't take what is mine

is mine or isn't mine?

I was briefly tempted to wonder if I should turn it the voice in to the Lost Property Office

"turn the voice in" or "turn it, the voice, in to". probably more the first

"I guess she might be right," the genie said, meeting my gaze briefly. "I don't really remember if I was ever part of a whole person. That explanation, um, it sounds a bit like what you'd read in a textbook of human psychology. You know, it usually explains how someone theorized that the human mind consists of an id, an alter-ego, and a superego, or something like that, and they might be right, but I don't think it actually begins to come close to explaining what being a human is actually like, or how you deal with one...."

I found this paragraph rather odd, in that the genie is *that* self-aware.

And questions and comments

Spoiler: ShowHide

Why doesn't the genie ask how Powell is able to bring her out of the notebook?

Overall, it seems like a little too much info dump and too little panicking to seem realistic. Like, the nature of a genie is great and all to go over, but if I were in that situation, I'd probably have freaked a bit more. Other than that, it seems fairly focused. Introduce the Lost Property Office and the genie and get the info to Simon. Also have Simon and the genie interact and have the first stress point of not-granting-wishes.

[Arakawa]

Ah, thanks for the prompt reply. (Didn't see it while I was still on IRC.)

I'll leave the minor issues for when I get back. For now, I consider just the important things below.

Some flow/wording issues:

Spoiler: ShowHide

"I guess she might be right," the genie said, meeting my gaze briefly. "I don't really remember if I was ever part of a whole person. That explanation, um, it sounds a bit like what you'd read in a textbook of human psychology. You know, it usually explains how someone theorized that the human mind consists of an id, an alter-ego, and a superego, or something like that, and they might be right, but I don't think it actually begins to come close to explaining what being a human is actually like, or how you deal with one...."

I found this paragraph rather odd, in that the genie is *that* self-aware.

Perhaps, though on the other hand the point is that any reasonably intelligent sentient being will contemplate its own nature at some point -- particularly a genie who feels she is acutely different from all of the humans she interacts with. I might have to rethink how this point is presented.

And questions and comments

Spoiler: ShowHide

Why doesn't the genie ask how Powell is able to bring her out of the notebook?

By magic, of course.

:-P

I think I'll have to lampshade a bit more clearly that Powell did use magic to reveal the genie, without necessarily going into the tedious and irrelevant details of what exact magic. Given the suggestions throughout the story that genies are often used by institutions in 'industrial' sort of applications instead of being allowed to form personal bonds with people, it's not implausible that there's a lot of magic around for dealing with them.

Overall, it seems like a little too much info dump and too little panicking to seem realistic. Like, the nature of a genie is great and all to go over, but if I were in that situation, I'd probably have freaked a bit more. Other than that, it seems fairly focused. Introduce the Lost Property Office and the genie and get the info to Simon. Also have Simon and the genie interact and have the first stress point of not-granting-wishes.

Guess Simon is a bit too calm to leave unexplained. He decides to himself that it's pointless to freak out in this kind of situation, and _mostly_ succeeds; I should have him actually reason that through a bit more in an earlier scene, though, so I can just call back to that attitude when further strange things happen.

All that exposition, I have to admit, I hope to streamline just a bit more. It's already about half of what I wrote down initially to get myself to understand the issue :-P

Thanks again for the feedback!

[Arakawa]

Tweaked some of the parts of the last section (1b) to produce what's hopefully a better emphasis on the nature of the genie's powers, with less melodrama. Also updated prologue and section 1a above with some minor tweaks.

[Arakawa]

Some thoughts on how I wound up handling the revised section 1a. The problems in the first draft were, in my opinion:

Spoiler: ShowHide

• Powell had no real indication Simon was the kind of person who would pay attention to her longwinded lecture on genies. Here I have her treat the lecture more as though it were a bad habit, though at the same time she gauges Simon's reaction and decides that, in general, he looks curious about such things, and so going into detail should help and not hinder in motivating him to not leave.
• The potential for a genie to wreak havoc simply following its natural inclinations was far too overstated. Some nuance was added that hopefully clarifies that the natural operation of a genie is not the thing Powell is afraid of.
• The whole melodrama around the genie's reaction to having to avoid granting wishes was, again, too overstated. I've tried to tone it down in the new revision.
  

[Arakawa]

Okay, and a point-by-point response to the rest of JonBob's feedback, that I hadn't addressed in my earlier response.

Some flow/wording issues:

Spoiler: ShowHide

In reality, it felt more like someone's clean but neglected garage or basement, writ large.

Don't think I've encountered "writ large" ever before. Maybe "only larger"?

'Writ large' basically means 'the same thing on a larger scale'. It's a reasonable idiom for Simon to be using, I think.

seemed to be given special pride of place

"place of pride"?

Again, this can be thought of as a weird expression of the kind Simon has an abnormal affinity towards in his narration.

She looked more nervous of me than I was of her, somehow, thought not in an unfriendly way.

"though" - also, how does one look nervous in an (un)friendly way? I can imagine it, but mostly it would be "nervous" by itself.

Thanks, I've tried to clarify the balance between the genie's nervousness and her generally happy attitude (before they make her promise not to grant wishes).

I on my part realized suddenly and in great detail that I was in fact holding her bridal-style, nearly dropped her, then figured out how to let her down to the floor in a gentle-enough fashion, then composed myself in an attempt to wipe from my memory the precise nature of the soft sensation of cradling her shoulder like that.

a bit run-on

Thanks, I've split that up.

requires for someone to deliberately transport, with the utmost care, and then deliberately drop an almost-priceless genie on a train... can you imagine what sort of reason someone might have for doing that?

"requires someone to deliberately..."

Personally, I think the original quote here is fine.

my sense of honour said I shouldn't take what is mine

is mine or isn't mine?

I was briefly tempted to wonder if I should turn it the voice in to the Lost Property Office

"turn the voice in" or "turn it, the voice, in to". probably more the first

Thanks for the catch there, in both cases -- oops >_>;;

[Muphrid]

Plot and Structure

We see a bit of the LPO and Powell's idiosyncratic interactions with her coworkers.  Of more importance is her conversation with Desmond.  We find out that magic is fairly well-known in higher circles, enough that the US government would catalogue and store articles of sufficient danger.  Desmond seems cursorily aware of this, too, and treats such matters merely like they're not really his area of responsibility or expertise.

Powell exposes the genie and explains more of what concerns her: it is highly unusual for a genie to be left unbound and unattended.  This helps shape the future plot: finding out who left the genie and for what purpose.  We already know who that is, of course, but for what purpose remains unclear.

Still, it strikes me that the threat we're being told of is very intellectual in nature, driven by lack of knowledge.  We see Powell is concerned, but we cannot really grasp the magnitude of the danger that is posed.  We're only convinced that there is something serious going on thanks to all this exposition. I can't really think of any other way to go about this, however, without making significant changes, so you may just have to roll with it.


Characterization and Development

"Why is this an issue for us, anyways?" Mr. Desmond asked. "We can't store the notebook, and does the kid even want to return a genie to us at this point? Can't we just tell him, 'congratulations, you've won a free genie' and send him on his way?"

Desmond seems to be taking this quite in stride, all things considered.  He certainly doesn't seem surprised by a genie appearing before him, more irritated, as if just witnessing this mess means more paperwork for him.


Powell seems quite tense in trying to cut through Desmond's authority to do what she intends.  This is, perhaps, the first time we've seen her on edge.  She rightly comes off a bit intimidating, and she conveys the seriousness of the situation well.

The genie comess off like a fish out of water, unaccustomed to the situation she's in, and to be honest, rather childish in temperment. Perhaps this just goes well with the image she's projecting.

Simon has kept rather level through this whole affair.  He appreciates Powell's reasoning and does the logical thing in having the genie hold off from granting more of his desires for the moment.


Style and Command

Below the window was a square, metal trapdoor, presumably for handing packages back and forth; beside the window was another completely uninviting door with a stern admonishment restricting access to "authorized personnel only".

I think the quotes go outside the ending punctuation?  Or maybe this is a regional thing.

"Yeeah," the guy at the computer remarked, taking Powell's appearance entirely in stride, "as always, you all just can't take a joke. Want to get down here and do your part of the job? There's more than a few items here that seemed a bit off to us."

Are you deliberately drawing out this vowel?

This was the exact opposite of either of those cases. I was unexpectedly looking down into the eyes of a short, highly attractive girl with dark hair and a face that was most suited for smiling wryly; an appearance that wasn't at all powerful or intimidating.[...]

Instead of the semicolon, perhaps consider a dash?