/lit/ - Literature

Hey, some people read my shitty poem!
Very cool.
Here's some of my prose(which is just as shitty, don't get too excited.) if you're interested.

>>5480886
>>5480892
>>5480900
>>5480906
>>5480912

Be back in a bit to do a few more critiques

>>5480912
And that's it. Chapter 24. Sorry for how much I put up. I'm really bad at choosing excerpts that can standalone, so I figured an entire chapter would by my best bet at things not coming off as misinterpreted or lacking.

Feel free to tear into it if it doesn't bore you to tears before finishing it. I'm always looking for critique no matter how sharp and cutting as it might be. I'm not the type to get insecure/upset over my work being blasted.

>>5480871
>22
>started too late
This is an American mentality and I'm not 100% sure where it comes from. That if you aren't groomed from an early age to be what you're going to be for the rest of your life, then you shouldn't bother doing it. Normal human beings don't function like that. People have to find out who they are and what they like before settling on a profession or a hobby. Yeah, sure, some find it quicker than others, but if you don't pursue the things that interest you because you believe it's too late for you, you're never gonna find any growth. You might as well oughta put a bullet in your head a twenty-five if you haven't found all the success you could've ever hoped for if that's the case.

>>5480906
Scenes from Camus' L'etranger passed through his head. Meursault, the main character of the novel, was so outside the realm of his world's social norms that it eventually led to his demise. So alien and unrelatable to the men who were charged with passing ultimate judgement on the him, Meursault couldn't be seen for the honest and simple man he was. Ultimately, that's what felled Meursault; the simplicity in which he engaged life. He chose not to function in his society in a way that was deemed appropriate and necessary, he did not devote his focus on the details of life that were so revered and religiously respected by others. Was Adam this simple man? Was he to eventually fall into similar pitfalls that plagued Meursault? The thought of it all made his fingers tremble and the butt of his cigarette shake. The defining difference between him and the fictional character was the emotive force that burned violently within his soul. He felt things. Anger, envy, frustration, sadness, lust. He had opinions he stood by and wished to convey them to others with verbal force. Still, he worried that it wasn't emotions that NatGov and peers cherished, but progress and human development. Two cultural facets of the Plates that Adam was completely apathetic towards. Did this mean that he was living on borrowed time, surrounded by enemies he currently perceived as friends? Would he soon find himself wrapped up within a series of events out of his control that paint him as a monster for all the Plates to see? Adam took a long drag from his cigarette and flicked its filter with his thumb as he watched the moon's glow permeate through darkened clouds and the city's skyline.

>>5480900
Content that the stretching he had done was enough to combat the atrophied sensation he felt in his arms and waist, Adam turned his eyes down towards his coffee table's surface and stared with content at the transparent orange glow gleaming off a bottle of pills. He'd gone a full four days without taking his prescribed medication and found himself quite liking where his mind was taking him since he began his bout of abstinence. He sniffed loudly and reached for the half-empty pack of cigarettes and lighter next to them instead.

But perhaps NatGov was pushing the human species to new evolutionary fronts, Adam debated with himself as he pushed the filter of an unsmoked fag under his upper lip and pulled on the handle of his balcony's sliding door, which pushed in a violent gust of wind and flapped the pages about of a number of books that littered his studio's floor. The men and women of the Plates were focused as one unified whole towards fulfilling this goal of progression that had been so glamorously painted for them by this magnanimous government. If they could all happily adjust to this new-aged way of thinking, why couldn't he? Was just a dud in the evolutionary chain? A member of his species that had not successfully adapted to the new a undeniably beneficial environment that surrounded his brothers and sisters, a member who could subsist but not pass on his mental traits of individualism and desire to live life rather than work within its confines? If NatGov was a machine and its conducive citizens were cogs, what was he? Adam covered the tip of his cigarette's end with his left palm and struggled for a moment to light it before finally succeeding and inhaling deeply of its toxic contents. He noted air traffic was slowly beginning to die down as transports passed his balcony in increments of a minute at a time. He watched as gray spindles of smoke would slowly rise from his cigarette's tip and paint vague images with their elongated forms in the air ahead of him before the buzzing of a vehicle's engine would emanate softly from outside his balcony's view and then snap by in a flash, whipping the fumes of his fag in a chaotic frenzy, taking a moment to be replaced anew.

>>5480892
He didn't understand it. It wasn't a crippling majority of people that watched Plate television, but those who did were infatuated by it, wished and prayed that they could one day contribute their own righteous deeds in NatGov's name. Hoping to propel themselves into this new page of humanity's history books and be lauded amongst their peers and loved ones as 'Men of Action,' or 'Tools of Development.' Tools was right, Adam reflected with a scoff as he picked the TV's remote off the coffee table and clicked the power button down with his thumb.

Oldworld entertainment never made its way to public broadcasting. Not because it was prohibited, but because people hated seeing a past filled with sunshine, open fields, and questions of existence. It made people uneasy, the whole 'not-understanding-why-we're here' question. People of the Plate knew why they were here and alive and clear of NSPE Dilution. They were to make progress, contribute to the positive development of the human psyche. 'Evolution,' Adam recalled, 'the genetic progress of our species into bounds never foreseen by the world of Old.'

"Bullshit." Adam said to himself, standing up from the edge of his couch to stretch his arms out and twist his torso left to right like rubber band you twine between your fingers and then release. It didn't matter what harsh environment they were placed in, animals, humans, plants, whatever; they didn't evolve in the process of years or decades or even centuries; it took hundreds of thousands of millenia to witness notable changes. You can't submerge a lizard in a pool of water and expect it to grow gills, nature doesn't work like that. Nature is slow, and alternatively, man is impatient. Adam held the blasphemous belief that progress wasn't life's purpose, but the more he tried to explain his position on life to friends and colleagues, the more he began to think progress simply wasn't his purpose. His best friend, David Shills, humored the discussions, but never took them all that seriously.

>>5480886
Outside of the balcony's closed sliding door, flying cab-transports and personal-crafts would fly past and violently whip wind across his face, which deterred him from sitting out on in the open air unless it was very late at night and air traffic was regulated exclusively down to the lower levels of the Plate.

Adam Addison--whose legs were tapping with such increased speed and weight, that you could say he was practically stomping on the floor needed to soon cease, as the tenant below him was becoming increasingly irritated and getting dangerously close to coming up the stairs to give him what for--had his eyes trained on his television's set with the silent ferocity of a lioness hunting her prey. He strained his vision in what looked like an attempt to somehow see through the TV's screen, as if attempting to discern something that was hidden discreetly within the pixels of the LCD monitor. A thick vein on the right of his neck was beginning to bulge to a dangerous degree and his face was turning pink.

Shit, he finally concluded, his legs stopping their tapping with one last stomp and his lungs taking in a much needed breath. Pure, unadulterated, boring, putrid, shit. Plate television programming was the goddamn joke of the century and everyone watching was the punchline. You would think that in a society where sixty thousand plus people are claustrophobically confined on and under a massive floating Plate two miles in diameter, entertainment would be somewhat, y'know, entertaining. Far from it though, Adam realized. Day in, day out, programming consisted of nothing that resembled the emotional thrill he obtained from reading Oldworld narratives and stories. There was no escapism to be found in the rectangular slab of a monitor that shone bright lights and grandiose images into his dinky apartment's living space. Instead, only 'factual' programs that were meant to establish a sense of pride and raison d'être within the viewer's soul. Entertainment was action films of gallant heroes with rugged beards and strong arms keeping actors dressed up as Marks away from the Plate's surface with bullets and knives, it was documentaries about weathered grandfathers and grandmothers struggling to rebuild a new haven for humanity, or talk shows conversing amicably with NatGov and TECAP officials, and wondrous displays of what new life-actualizing and hardship-simplifying technologies that TECAP was currently developing in their massive R&D facility for general public usage. It was propaganda, Adam wanted to say. Propaganda the public gluttonously devoured and demanded more of.

Dull blueish-green lights that reminded him of neon vomit surrounded the perimeter of his apartment ceiling. Illuminating the small living space of his studio apartment with harsh light and oversaturated tones, the long bulbs always gave him the sneaking suspicion that perhaps his landlord had mistakenly rented him out a place that was actually sanctioned for an asylum patient rather than a tenant who consistently complied with his rental agreement.

He sat on the very edge of his worn to hell-and-back pleather couch, also blue-green, with his hands clasped tightly together in his lap and his bare feet tapping away at the stained linoleum floor of his whopping two-hundred-and-ninety-two square foot studio apartment. The linoleum tile ran across the entire expanse of his apartment's floor, and was segregated into tiny six inch bright yellow square pieces, inside of which had even tinier golden-brown diamonds. Which, contrasted against the lime green paint of the studio's walls, made him want to dry heave an interior designer who didn't construct roomscapes that pushed people into wanting to gouge their eyes out. His living space, which tripled as his bedroom and dining room, connected directly to his excuse of a kitchen which contained a stove, two sinks, refrigerator, a sparse collection of cabinets for storage, and some space for cutting up and preparing food. Something he avoided doing as he figured the less time he spent in this hellscape of clashing colors, the better.

On the floor, in the center of his apartment lay a lavishly designed red-and-brown oriental-style rug which he purchased three years back to cover some of the horrifically colored floor he had grown so much to hate. He absolutely loved the rug, and spent much time staring at the intricate details of the multi-colored fabric's curved shapes and lines which ran into and against each other in a wonderful display of rug design. To his right of the couch was the door that led into his apartment, and past that was his kitchen. Directly ahead of him and past the small coffee table he eats upon roughly once a day was his television set that was screwed tightly into the wall opposite of him and is owned by the leasor. Directly to the left of the TV was his pride and joy; a wooden, unlacquered, pale-brown, and crudely constructed bookshelf he had made himself--which was also bolted into the wall against his landlord's approval and for the very same reasons that the TV was. The bookshelf was overfilled with numerous Oldworld books, manuscripts, encyclopedias, and comic-book novels he had accrued into his collection over the years. Around the bookshelf's base and laid out haphazardly were less prized pieces of literature that he didn't deem to have enough sentimental value to uproot the place of more veteran and existentially thrilling endeavors. Finally, to his left was the studio's balcony, which towered twelve stories over the loud and bustling ground floor of the Manhattan Plate.

>>5480525
I had started writing seriously right at the tail-end of high school.

As for not having enough experience though, don't worry so much about it. Your first book is probably going to be shit, everyone's is. I remember the first novel I tried to write was a space opera I trashed after about 25,000 words.

Starting to write a book isn't a commitment to finish it, it's simply an experiment to see if the content you wish to write is something you actually enjoy writing. You might start this book of yours and find out you hate it like I did.

It's better to do that, get this bad idea out of the way and move on to something with a bit more substance, then hang about on the same idea never doing anything(and thereby never growing as a writer) with it.

>>5479476
>>5479517
>>5479557
I will, but try not to expect too much, it's a bit difficult finding a small digestible standalone excerpt out of 200,000+ words to throw on /lit/. I've put stuff from the book that people have both hated and (I think unironically) enjoyed. I'll post up a short chapter that hits right after the novel's first act, and introduces a new character.

Just give me a sec to get it together here.

>>5479293
23.

Wondering if I've gone through the "will I finish this in time" crisis? Because I just finished with that near the end of this last year when all my stress and anxiety about not finishing this novel quickly enough culminated into my development/extreme exacerbation of Crohn's disease.

Spent a good two months bedridden and five days in the ER. Once I was back on my feet, it kinda hit me that you can't rush art so I stopped stressing about things and resigned myself to accepting that the book'll be done when it's done.

>>5479223
Will do. I used to post excerpts here like a year or so ago, so it'll be nice to come back and let everyone know how it does(or if it does) when I get to harvesting a final draft out of it.

It'll be nice if I can come in with some good news that'll inspire you homos to do your dreams and all that.

Irregardless, I'm most excited to finish this story not because I want to get it published, but because I've brainstormed two new ideas for novels to write after this one, and I cannot wait to jump into them. Which I think is the mindset every writer should have. Maybe if John Kennedy Toole wrote something else after Confederacy of Dunces instead of spending the rest of his life pleading publishers to give it a chance on market, the fat ass wouldn't have killed himself.

>>5479238
Thanks. I'm happy with the world-building I've done and really like spending time with the characters and environment I created. Hoping other people dig it as well.

>>5479219
what lengths of change***

>>5479185
Nope, just the symbol I decided to use to reference that character throughout the outline.

You can see tiny versions of them beneath the focused section, detailing when each scene occurs alongside the main plot. Just an organizational tool.

>>5479201
Post apocalyptic renaissance with some sci-fi elements in there going over what lengths our current societal structure would have to undergo in order to reestablish itself in(hopefully) a more focused and productive state.

Takes a lot from Lewis Mumford and Joseph Campbell in terms of theming, and Orwell/Bradley/Wallace/MGS2 in terms of feel.

It's shit

>>5479156
This.

Been working on my novel for 3 years now, OP. I have plans to get the thing published, but finishing it for me comes first.

Pic related.

>There's actually some decent stuff here, lemme fix that.
Which am I?
The Man or the Machine?
The Artist or the Cog?
Am I that writer with a monochrome flat cap
Taking drags of words from my cigarettes,
Or the white-collared worker
pumping away at resume templates
Always looking for that better job?

Am I to create or am I to work?
Sleepless nights with mares of insecurity,
Or hollow days with dreams of greatness?

Tell me!
Which am I?
The Alive or the Just Barely?
The megabytes of unfinished text files,
growing in size like risky behemoths with every keystroke?
Or the constant shuffle back and forth, to and fro,
head too muffled by the rustle and bustle of that holy financial security?

Symbiosis be fucked, I know I want just the one,
but can’t subsist without the other.
I want to be that Man with reams of thoughts under his arm,
with written ideals and breakthroughs that others need to see.
But just as I fight against our current human condition,
It rears its head to lash back.
Wanting nothing more than to swallow me up,
And turn me too into the tragic characterizations that I so fear.
So I ask again now,
Walking on the shaky double path that threatens to crumble beneath my feet,
Making my bones tremble and causing this alien weight to slither up my gut:

Which am I?
The Man or the Machine?

>>5478861
>"Sniggered like a cunt,"
>"Hah! Faggot!"
>then some heavenly-looking faggot started spouting out bullshit in Latin and offered me the eternal happiness. Hello, it's 2010, dipshit! Ever heard of Richard Dawkins?
These bits make me feel like I'm on /v/ and I hate it. You're an adult, try not to show you're immaturity so blatantly through your writing. I can really see where you come from with these lines, and it takes me outta the story.

Loved the flow everywhere else and thought overall it was a pretty great piece of flash fiction though.

Pointing attention to >>5474546 as there seems to be actual traffic in this thread.

>>5475833
I started Exile in the Kingdom, it's already looking to be a pretty quick read. Might do Ubik next. Thanks.

>>5474546
I just came off this massive Shirley Jackson Anthology that I had been stuck on for like 4-5 months, so I guess I'm looking for something that'll be easily digestible and not to heavy.

I've narrowed it down to these seven.
Please help.

Exile and the Kingdom
The Red and the Black
Broom of the System
Leaves of Grass
Kafka on the Shore
Ubik
Slaughterhouse-Five

>>4521118
Thanks, this being my first attempt at a story like this, I'm definitely having a bit of trouble with pacing and narrative feel. Especially when it comes to keeping the veil over the reader's eyes while maintaining consistency with the character's voice.

Still working on finishing the thing, and I'm definitely happier with proceeding paragraphs then these early ones I posted. Hoping once I go back and do rewrites I can figure out what kind of execution I need to use for these earlier descriptions.

But thanks again, really appreciate the feedback.

>>4521094
No, I'd never insult someone's work without a proper critique.

Or be so passive-aggressively spiteful.

There's a memory or dream saved away, deep within the complex subterfuge that is my mind. I can hear it like a far off echo begging me to listen on its ill-defined calls.

I can see I am a child, this being the single memory that remains from that time, and my vision tells me that I'm soaring through the air looking over the Landscape. Seeing its true scope. Boundless. Neverending. Horrific. Hearing about the fields that surround our facility on all sides for hundreds of miles in every direction is one thing, but actually seeing them with your own pair of eyes? I can assure you it's another matter entirely.

I remember, those four-legged beasts with shadows so large and bodies coated with muscles striations and thick sheets of desert-bronze fur rolling over their galloping backs. I remember how they bared their fangs big as men from behind the thick flaps of meat that made up their mouths. I remember watching them roam below me in packs, these sterling examples of formidability, and I remember them tracking through the tall thickets of dried underbrush with predatory movements some just-under-equally-ferocious monstrosity that had been dealt the unlucky hand of living within this harsh Landscape alongside these feline behemoths. I remember the thick mist of red that soared out in a heavy plume from the smaller beast's gouged neck and stomach. I remember the streaks of crimson splaying themselves against the arid plains I flew over. And lastly, I remember my young mind praying with futility to turn around and go back the way I had come.
--
The facility I mentioned can be most simply described as a steel-and-concrete-box prison of indefinable size and utility that we call home. The Caretakers claim that this facility is the closest thing we have to a safe haven. My memory begs me to believe otherwise. It informs me that I come from somewhere else, somewhere very far away and lacking in the abusive horrors that so endlessly accost us--specifically, what follows that all too familiar and absolutely putrid smell of paroxysm-inducing fear that haunts every corner of this metal deathtrap we call our 'safe haven.' Our home.

My memory also reminds me this facility is surrounded for an untraversable distance by creatures that are stronger, better, and more attuned for survival than we are. This I have always known but never bothered to share with the people I have met, grown close to, and on most cases watched die as I sat quietly crouched in corners with my breath held tight against that stench and my hands clamped around my ears to block out the wild shrieks of people I called 'friend.'

We, with our thin layer of soft skin and fragile bones that don't crack against Residuals' bites, but instead simply tremble for only seconds before shattering into dust beneath the relentless PSI unloaded by their sharp jaws--we are not met to inherit this world. We're meant to feed it.

>>4516112
That's why I namefag, personally. Not that I'll ever put anything out worth publishing because I'm horrible and everything I've ever put down is uninspired drivel.