geoffreydow's profile
AGE:
43
LOC: Canada
GEN: Male
LAST LOGIN: August 20
LOC: Canada
GEN: Male
LAST LOGIN: August 20
I am 41 years old and have “wanted to be a writer” since I was 15 or so. I did a lot of writing in my teens and early 20s, including a couple of (very bad) novels and a number of short stories, but slowed down after that.
In large part, that was due to a novel I began in my mid-20s and which haunts me still. Some bits of it are quite good, others are awful, and fixing the latter has been an ongoing frustration for far too long. Friends tell me I should scrap it and I agree – but it haunts me still.
In any case, I intend to make a concerted effort to work at my writing again, and this seems like a good place in which to do so.
And I’m curious to see what others are up to as well. This should be interesting.
Items
Version 1
11 Reviews
5 Comments
"Eros starts young," Lawrence said. I glanced away from the slender girl I was admiring and caught Lawrence's eye. He nodded and pointedly looked back at the sidewalk. The girl was wearing a ragged, very short, white skirt, and a pink halter that left fully half her uplifted breasts in plain sight. She strode along in sneakered feet with an arm-swinging strut that seemed at once an invitation to look and a warning to stay away. From behind, her legs were almost bony-slender, her ass barely a...
Ratings & Rankings
[ View all items ]
Reviews
This isn't going to attract a literary agent, but your daughter might enjoy it. As a story, I didn't believe in the narrator - she sounded older than even a very precocious 10 year-old. More problematic, there is no narrative tension here; it is not a story, so much as a diary-entry, by a character who is a subject, not an actor. It might be stronger if the narrator *did* go downstairs and confront her parents. The ending would have been stronger if she had made a big scene - "I'm 10 now! I'm...
Deleted Item
This is not ready for prime time. Something that would help, I think, would be to change the narrator. Maybe it's a shrink in the hospital, discussing the case with a colleague - as it stands, I couldn't stop wondering who the narator was talking to, and why. Also, this piece lacks verisimilitude? How does this woman, this office-worker on the 6th floor, manage to fly off to Egypt for an archeological did, then through a party for her office 2 weeks after her return? The narrator makes it cle...
Deleted Item
This was a really frustrating read - absolutely horrible copy-editing mixed with a story that teased but that didn't quite deliver. I'll start with a few examples of sloppy editing that, a lot more than once, made me want to just close my browser; corrections are in square brackets. - "breast that were nothing short of perfections." This should read "breasts that were nothing short of perfection." - "on her left leg was a scratch on her left leg that was barely bleeding..." Should read: "on h...
Not sure what you meant when you said this piece was intended to be prose - it *is* prose. For your first story, it shows promise. Your description of the party - the girl who spilled a drink on herself, the boy who laughed at her - bring the reader into the scene really well. But it's not really a story, more like a prose poem, a description of a feeling, rather than a *telling* of something that happened. As a reader, I want to know who the narrator is, who her lover is, and why they should...
I am a long-time SF reader but have somehow managed to never read any of her work. Unfortunately, your piece did not convince me that I should, largely because of a number of simply incorrect rhetorical devices you used. Granted that female SF writers have always been a minority, there have long been a lot more than the 3 you named - Judith Merril, Leah Bracket, C.L. Moore and Andre Norton from the old days and off the top of my head; in the past 30 years, Catherine Ansaro, James Tiptree Jr.,...
[ View all reviews ]
Favorites
People
