Did I get it right this time? I hope so. I would not like to be a cretin twice.
Just out of curiosity, is anyone other than Allester reading this? Go ahead and post your thoughts, comments, or questions. After my participation in the writing survivor contest QB-2, there is nothing you can say that would make me feel bad.
Yeeeeah. I just signed up so I could do just that.
It's a perfect example of an
Idiot Plot. The only reason any of it happens at all is because everyone is functionally retarded. Just how did the virus leak into the atmosphere? Were they on the bloody
roof rack? I'd have thought they would take better care of their only salvation. How the hell did they miss the 'Homo' bit at the beginning? When did the Morphs develop this virus? The Morphs on Earth are too primitive, and they would never have got away with it before the humans left. How did they develop it so long ago anyway, when they are only received sentience within the last few years, and those that were advanced enough were off on another planet?
In addition to this, a lot of the stuff concerning the death of the human race is impossible. How could a few beakers of this virus infect everyone on the planet? Especially when said beakers are spread out over the entire damn atmosphere. The Earth Morph getting infected, preventing the humans from returning? Completely absurd. The Morphs immune systems would eventually wipe out the virus. Besides which, why does it affect them at all? By all rights, the virus should’ve died with The Wolf Tit. The idea of it infecting the entire planet, within a few years no less, shatters my already battered suspension of disbelief to pieces.
It reads like a high school essay. The sentences are far too clipped; they just do not flow with each other, as if you intended each one to be read separately. You keep repeating and over explaining things, apparently just so you can beef up the word count. Why? No one is keeping count. No one is going to complain because you used ten words where five would do. There is not one sentence in there that I could not cut in half, without any change to the meaning at all.
You have characters explaining things to people who already know them. And considering how you were giving Allester such a hard time about 'showing, not telling' you do it quite a lot. All your characters sound the same. They have no voice, no uniqueness. I could swap them all around and have the exact same story. The worst example is Captain Human Whose Name I Forget, whose personality seemed to change every other paragraph. The characters spoke in the same way the story was narrated.
Now that those are out of the way, let me tell you about thesauri. Thesauri are books that – ah, what am I doing, you know this, because you’re using one. The thing is, you see, that the alternate words are not synonymous, they are not interchangeable, they different meanings, is this getting through to you? So when you pick out words at random to replace, it does not make you seem clever, it makes you seem illiterate.
The plot. Good god, the plot. It is so predictable; it was obvious from the start what this ‘weapon’ was. Oh, the humans lost? DID NOT SEE THAT COMING A MILE AWAY. I could even predict what a character would say before he would say it. Well, the basic point would be the same, since I do not speak Generic Fanastyese. The ending is just one huge Deus Ex Machina. Just where did they get all that intelligence from, anyway? How could they possibly know what happened to every last detail? Why did they contact Mc Ferret after so long, wouldn’t they assume he was dead? Is anyone in this story even remotely aware of military procedure?
This is just a minor pet hate of mine rather than an actual criticism, but why do furries keep referring to hands as ‘paws’? They have articulate fingers and opposable thumbs, which paws do not. They are hands; the fact that they belong to a guy covered in fur doesn’t change that fact. This is even weirder, because you refer to their feet as feet, which could actually pass as paws. Also, why do they refer to themselves as ‘beasts’? Seems a bit like a human calling himself a monkey.
Allester is going to be a better writer than you, by the way. There are heaps of amateur grade technical flaws, but once he works those out he will be a far better story teller than you. That was not really related, I just thought throw it out there.
If you read this Allester and you are serious about writing, then please do not listen to this wassock.
Next, I am going to take specific examples from your text and explain what is wrong with them, and how you can do better. I would do that in the main body, but that would require extra effort on my part and bollocks to that. I’ll write the next part in a new post, to be posted at precisely whenever the hell I feel like it.
