Review of Trick or Tweet
Plot: Reading your story, what I liked most about it was your plot, or more exactly, the progression of your plot. I confess that when I was reading the first part of the piece, (I later could see three distinct stages to your plot), I thought: oh, no, just another doomsday story. You progressed beyond that however, as you did past the second stage where I thought for sure you were heading for a ‘1984’ scenario, and you landed squarely on the main plot which is the most believable: humankind doesn’t learn from its own mistakes.
Style: There are a lot of styles that can carry this plot; I don’t believe one can say which the best is unless you compare them all side by side. What is interesting to note is that even though narrative tends to slow the pace of a story down, and conversely dialog tends to speed things up, you have managed to reverse that: your narrative accelerates the story through chunks of time, sometimes years, while your dialog acts as a pause button on a particular moment.
Voice: You chose 1st-person narrative which is not a bad choice; however, you have not only limited me to see what John Carter sees, but also constrained me to learn through him as well, and I was not entirely convinced that he had learned the lesson he was teaching at the end of the story. At the start with Carolyn the girlfriend and later with Carolyn the wife, he appears to follow her into this ‘technological mistake’. Had she miraculously lived and it happened again would he follow her again, or did he really learn the lesson?
Setting/Characters: I have grouped setting and characters together because: since the story is largely dialog, the setting is within the characters themselves, namely John and Carolyn. I wanted to see more of the world around them through their emotions. There were points: Randy’s death, Courtney’s death, when there was problems with the implants, where I would have liked to have seen much more through your characters. Even though John is the narrator, Carolyn is just as central to the story. I would have liked to have seen more conflict, not only between the two of them about their different views on the technology, but through John’s eyes, the conflict within Carolyn herself. She was ‘hardwired’ to technology way before the implants; it was her whole life, and she lost it all. Psychologically, would she really be so quick to jump back in? I wanted to be convinced enough so that I would want to reach into your story and throttle your characters and yell at them!
Dialog: Overall I liked your dialog. At points in the story as I have stated above and therefore won’t reiterate, I would have liked to have seen a little more depth.
Grammar & such: Your word processor can do a much better job than I can; nothing singed my eyebrows.
Suggestions: You’ll need many more reviews before you can even begin to get a consensus, so in the end it’s you who must love your story and love your characters, but remember, don’t be afraid to hate your characters, too. If your characters do things to tick me off, I want to hate them, but I can’t hate them, or love them, unless you do first.
Overall: Good plot with a lot of potential. Should you decide to rewrite, in whatever way you decide to rewrite, I would like to read it again. Thank you for sharing your story.
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Scene: The depths of the ocean is Raeyna’s world, from which she has not ventured. She is not alone in her world; she has heard stories about those who live on the surface. The stories are inaccurate, and the surface dwellers must appear as mythical to the residents of the ocean as Raeyna's kind are to the surface people.
On!