Remembrance Dear And Damn’d Oblivion by Antonia Overstreet

I noticed “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” this month for its apocalyptic setting, its play on memory, and its concept. However, “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” reads oddly detached for a story centering so much on action, peril, and regret, and the potential loss of a parent in a world empty enough that Padi is almost Mbani’s entire society—a point already noted in the author’s notes, where the goal is to cut to the emotional core of the piece. So, this month I’d like to suggest a more holistic approach to that problem and discuss tone and how we establish it: why how we convey information is just as important as what we say, and how to make those match.

“Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” has all the markers of a story that’s highly emotional and highly action-oriented: an in media res opening—with a storm, no less!—a parent in peril, terrible choices to be made. However, the way it’s told—the diction, the use of grounding details, the pacing, the atmosphere—are almost entirely at odds with the story readers are informed they’re going to get, and the effect turns out to be jarring for me as a reader.

We’ll look at these craft elements one by one, and hopefully, by the end, have a recipe for bringing out the emotion in this piece.

“Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” is a story explicitly centred around memory—losing it, sacrificing it, holding on to it—and that means readers’ attention is going to be called to the relative vibrancy of Mbani’s descriptors and memories. The piece pulls off a real contrast in the back half, when Mbani is remembering the people she loves, but that contrast itself highlights the small corners cut, the sentence-level shorthanding in the rest of the piece.

“Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” really shines when it’s working with concrete details—the smell of storms, the sound of rain in the dust—but they’re frequently overshadowed by sketchier, more archetypical descriptors—a scream surrounded by appropriately timed thunder—or thoughts that are only halfway on the page. For example: “It’s pointless to cry any longer, drowned out by the rain.” Is the point of Mbani’s tears to be seen or heard (by whom?). Why? Does she mean “cry out to Padi” instead? This is a tiny imprecision, but it’s the kind that adds up slowly for readers to create a sense of cardboard sets instead of real worlds—and the kind that brings a story and its emotions into sharpness and focus when defined well.

I’d also look at hedge words: “I feel” comes up a great deal, as if Mbani is reporting her feelings to the reader from a distance—and that of course distances the emotion readers receive. I’d suggest looking at ways to communicate Mbani’s feelings that aren’t direct reportage: her body language, her reactions, what she notices or doesn’t, the tone of her voice. All those things are clues that readers can use to have a more direct pipeline to her emotional state.

I’d extend that to the narrative voice, and think about what forces or people in the story do rather than what readers are told they’re going to do. For example, lightning is a significant danger when you’re in a flash-flooding desert and you’re the tallest thing around; it’s a significant physical risk. And Mbani’s narration seems to acknowledge that, with: “I can try to drag him home, but will he make it that long? Will I?” But the story then undercuts this flag to readers (“look out, there’s risk from the weather”) by leaving Mbani and Padi out in the storm for the entire rest of the piece, with no ill effects. The shown message is undermining the told message, and generally readers will believe what we show them over what they’re told is true. I’d suggest thinking about how to bring those two things into alignment: how does what Mbani does support, not contradict, what she’s saying she does, feels, or thinks?

For another example where the narrative undermines the emotional content: “Grit and gravel bite into my bare skin, only aggravating the awkwardness of the pose.” The first half of this sentence sets readers up for a stimulus response: pain. What we get instead is aggravation and awkwardness, which then feels like an underreaction on Mbani or the story’s part—and one that’s distanced or underplayed physical sensation or emotion, in a story that’s supposed to be about pain. Again, the messages don’t match.

That sense of danger-but-not-danger extends into the pacing and structure. “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” feels quite long, even at 2,600 words, and I’d suggest that’s because of the structural loops in the back half of the story: Mbani repeatedly trying to experience and forget dear memories, and those memories repeatedly not being enough to heal Padi (and how does the exciser know what memory is sufficient to heal someone, anyway?). These actions aren’t moving the narrative forward; the failures aren’t creating new situations or new choices, and when put up against the fact that Mbani and the narrative are telling us this is an urgent situation, again, there’s a clash. Which message should readers believe? Bringing those messages into cooperation—pacing and plotting that support, and not undermine the idea that this is a high-risk situation—means there’s one unified message, and it’s clear to readers how Mbani feels, and how reading this is supposed to feel.

As it stands, the ways “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” undermines its own message in the delivery create a simultaneous distance and self-centredness; a situation that should be visceral, wrenching, painful, frightening, desperate which is rendered in a way that seems clinical, a philosophical problem being handled from far away. What wouldn’t you forget to save one you love, asked in a laboratory setting. “I could lose him at any moment,” the piece reminds us, but I’d suggest that a stronger draft of “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” wouldn’t need to tell anyone so. It would hang over the entire story, over Mbani’s every action, over how she chooses her actions like a stink.

Ultimately, I’d suggest looking at “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” through that lens: What it’s supposed to say, and how every element of craft either supports or negates that idea. Bring “Remembrance Dear and Damn’d Oblivion” into colour—real stakes, real choices, real pain, real loss, real indecision, and a real possibility that she might choose another path or the path she chooses might not work after all—and the emotion will come pouring through.

Best of luck!

–Leah Bobet, author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (2015)

Requesting A Hero Chapter 2 by Cara Averna

This submission hits two of my sweet spots: my Classical education and my long-standing love for characters caught out of time. There’s great potential here, between the idea of a Classical hero getting his mojo back, and the potential for contrast and conflict with the modern world and the woman who represents it. And a bonus: restaurant wars, another of my favorite things.

Usually I focus on worldbuilding and larger plot issues when I’m reading a draft, but as I read this chapter, I kept coming back to issues of language and narrative voice. As important as it is for the plot and the worldbuilding to hold together, in this particular genre—urban fantasy, give or take—voice is really important. It’s the tone and style that makes the story work. The author needs a firm command of her craft, and a clear sense of how words work and how to fit them together.

It’s particularly challenging with two viewpoint characters who are so different in so many ways. Claire is a modern woman, with modern vocabulary and attitudes. Argos is her complete opposite: an ancient hero whose native language is Greek, and who is completely alien to Claire’s world and time. Their portions of the narrative should read very differently, right down to the choices of words and the way the sentences are constructed.

One thing I might suggest would be to eliminate contractions when Argos is telling the story. He speaks without them, but his narration is full of them. This one fairly simple fix will give the his narrative a more old-fashioned feel, but if it’s done well, it won’t seem stiff or stilted—just a little more dignified and stately than Claire’s easier modern style.

Word choice is important, too. Argos is unlikely to think he “wasn’t a fan of” something—that’s a contemporary term. Words like “jerked” and “grabbed” and “bossed around” are more modern as well, and the verbing of the noun in “access the collection of gold” fits oddly with some of the more archaic phrasing of the section: the reference to gold rather than money or cash, for example, and the mention of a “hearth to rest in.”

The latter points to another issue as well. Not long ago I came across a quotation attributed to Mark Twain, to the effect that a writer should undertake to choose the right word and not its second cousin. The right word is really important in a narrative of opposites like this one, and it’s crucial to make sure that a word means what it’s trying to mean in its context.

“Hearth” here reads if it’s a synonym for some kind of ancient dwelling, but its actual meaning is basically a fireplace. He’s looking for a fireplace to sleep in? Wouldn’t he burn? It is true that “hearth and home” can be taken to mean the house as a whole, but the hearth itself is the structure around which the home is built, the place where the fire burns—of which Hestia happens to have been the goddess. Is that what Argos is really thinking when he uses the word? If so, that might be made a little clearer.

Other words and phrases strike a little off true as well. “Smile dropping” is a rather unusual way of referring to the change of expression from smile to its opposite. Eyes can drop, but a smile is more likely to die or fade. Similarly, when Argos speaks of being well, Claire judges that to be “a loose word,” but the idiom isn’t quite on point. An analogy can be loose, or a connection, or even a reference, but not a word. And then there’s the scowl that “pulled at her lips”—a scowl is an expression of the eyebrows and forehead; when it’s the lips it’s more likely to be a sneer or a twist of anger or scorn. In recent years, the frown seems to have moved downward from the forehead to the mouth, but with so many other second-cousin constructions in the draft, it’s probably better to err on the side of caution.

It’s a good idea to pay attention to the meaning of individual words—to be sure the word means what it wants to mean in a particular context. Argos refers to Claire several times as a “nymph,” but in his world, that word would have a specific meaning. A nymph is a minor divinity, a spirit of an element or a place: a sea nymph, a water nymph, a wood nymph. It’s clear he knows she’s mortal, and while the first time might be read as a sort of metaphor, he does it often enough that it seems as if the word is trying to be an archaic synonym for “girl” or “young woman.” But that, in Greek, would actually be “koure” or (as in the case of a friend of mine whose mother was a Greek scholar), “Kori.”

Another puzzlement for me was the reference to “the rheumatic tone of the Greek accent.” I’m not sure what “rheumatic” wants to mean; when it’s at home, it refers to arthritic inflammation or rheumatism. A rheum in the archaic sense is a stuffy cold, with mucus. So a Greek speaker sounds as if he hab a code id his node?

Watch out for word connections, too. Loose, hard things rattle; bones can rattle, or teeth, but muscles are denser and softer. Abilities however are not soft; muscles can be, and a body in general, but the more abstract concept calls for a different word. Weakened, maybe. Eroded. Diminished.

I’m not quite sure what kind of rush would cause a heart to pound—a rush of emotion? A rush of excitement or mirth or…? And when it does, it won’t pound against his chest; that implies it’s outside his ribcage. More likely it pounds inside his chest, or against his ribs (which are likewise inside).

A few other notes as I read:

Watch repetitions; when I’m editing my own work I highlight them, and then either cut or replace. Green eyes, for example. Staring. Pinning with a stare. The phrase “not to mention.” The storm brewing in several different iterations (but I do like the way her reference to it segues into his viewpoint, and his more metaphorical view of what the term means). Rain. Dock.

The grip on the wheel, multiplied—and would she really be grateful if, after she’s screwed up by ignoring his advice, he asserts his superiority over her and rubs it in for good measure? Sure enough, in the next sentence or two she’s angry with him, which feels more true to her personality and the situation.

I’ll be interested to see how this story evolves through the drafts. The idea is intriguing and the characters have potential. Once the words are under control, the narrative will read much more smoothly, and the contrast between the characters will be stronger and clearer.

–Judith Tarr

Defending Omaha – Prologue and Chapter One by Bill Mc

I’m a sucker for old-fashioned military SF, so I was pleased to see this among last month’s submissions. There’s definitely room for it in the genre. Sometimes we want new and edgy, and sometimes we want some good, solid vintage.

I like the classic elements: the post-holocaust landscape, the Midwestern US city that goes down hundreds of levels, the military school on the surface, and the plucky female protagonist (shades of Podkayne and her sister-characters). There’s some cool worldbuilding, notably in the nanothread vest, and a nod to contemporary warfare in the drone force. It’s a good start; a nice taste of what’s to come in the rest of the novel.

I have questions about worldbuilding and about certain details. Some might be answered in later chapters. Others may want some rethinking, or a change of authorial or narrative angle. As always, it’s entirely up to the author whether and when to answer any editorial question. It’s yourstory. These are just things that occurred to me while I read and re-read the excerpt.

First, the epistolary beginning has a degree of charm, and lets us get a sense of the personalities of Serenity and her dad. I did wonder however, how the mail is being transported. Is it physical mail or e-mail? If it’s physical, how do the last couple of letters manage to reach their destinations? If it’s e-mail, that would imply some sort of internet in the city.

It appears there is the technology for that, since Serenity has a “comset embedded into the top of her left hand,” but I’m missing some indications that this technology has been built into the story. Serenity wakes up to an alarm in Chapter 1, but rather than checking the comset first thing to find out what’s going on, she goes out and rounds up the troops, even taking time to not-assess herself in the mirror (I see what you did there). She remembers to check the comset long after she would logically have done so.

Then there are the ancillary questions. If she has a comset, is that a common or ordinary thing? Does everyone have one? Or is it just the First Cadet?

The thing is, if the tech exists and is in regular use, it changes how people interact with each other. Since the advent of the smartphone, everyone is habitually checked in. Adults who aren’t are anomalies—and kids who aren’t are even more so.

It might make sense for the internet to have completely collapsed and for Omaha to have reverted to pre-internet modes of communication, but as long as mail is passing up and down the levels without apparent interruption, and as long as there’s the comset embedded in her hand, there’s an implication that the tech is still there. Particularly since nanotech is clearly very advanced, and drones are in extensive use, this reader wonders why information technology didn’t survive. How does the comset work, then? What’s its regulation use and why isn’t it the first thing she resorts to?

My other big question about this excerpt is the portrayal of Serenity. Female protagonists are not unheard of in classic science fiction—Heinlein was known to make a point of them–and having a female protagonist here is a nice link between the Golden Age and the modern era. But a number of things have changed in how we write and perceive them, and there’s a fine line to walk between the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

If advances in gender roles crashed along with most cities in the US, and society went back to the male dominance of Golden Age science fiction (or “medieval chivalry” as Serenity calls it), then Serenity’s position as First Cadet doesn’t quite parse. The military would be a male domain, and her rising to the top of the cadet rankings would be a notable anomaly. She would be dealing with a whole complex of sexism, misogyny, resentment, and outright harassment.

We get a taste of that in the “old man” cadet who patronizes her by making allusions to feminine frailty. She, being badass, kicks him in the nuts—and from that I deduce that Subbers are much more gender-egalitarian than Toppers. That’s a good bit of detail. (And it ain’t chivalry, believe me. It’s good old sexism.)

At the same time, I wonder how cadets are selected, because if Subbers never make it to the top and she’s exceptional for having done so, and Toppers are all about females-weaker-than-males, how does she make it into the intersection between these two cultural barriers? What factors have allowed her to overcome this double bias?

Subbers aren’t necessarily any more advanced about gender roles than Toppers, either. When her dad tries to reassure her about the obnoxious cadet with “He probably had no idea someone from down under could be so smart, wonderful, and pretty,” he’s begging to have his own nuts kicked through the back of his head. A truly gender-equal society would not base one-third of the value of a female-presenting member on the fact that she’s pretty. It’s just as patronizing as the things the cadet said to her. I can see her grinding her teeth as she reads his letter, and working very hard to remember, “It’s just Daddy. Daddy tries, but he has his moments, too. Do not make a note to kill Daddy.”

She’s going to have more than enough to deal with on the military front, but it’s small details like this that help develop a character and define her arc in the story. If she’s fighting ongoing devaluation of her talents because of her gender on top of wher she comes from, she has an extra level of stress to deal with, and additional complications within the various lines of the plot. It’s not just that she’s a Subber, it’s that she’s a female Subber. Everything is at least twice as hard.

As I said, this is a good start. I’ll be interested to see how it evolves with further thinking-through of the worldbuilding and the characterization.

–Judith Tarr

Just Open The Door by David Eisman

One of the advantages of writing within a genre is that the author and readers share knowledge of a huge pool of works and their common elements.  This allows the author to introduce rich subtext into a story.  If I put the word “vampire” into my story, readers will think of Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, and others.  Readers will think of the rules that often govern vampires, the various ways vampires have been destroyed, and why one may or may not want to destroy a vampire.  The author, then, can minimize exposition (background information, explanations), because the reader already knows a lot.  The author can focus on how her vampires are different, and on showing us this particular vampire story.  This can be invaluable in a short story, when every word is precious, and it can add layers of meaning, emotion, and resonance to a story.

“Just Open the Door” takes advantage of this pool of knowledge horror readers share.  By the end of the third sentence, I feel I’m in a familiar situation, often near the climax of a horror story/movie/novel, in which the protagonist, Richie, is fleeing the evil and has come to a dead end.  Because the situation is familiar, I don’t think I’ve missed anything critical to my understanding of the story.  My recognition of this situation also creates immediate suspense and urgency and allows the author to move the story ahead with a minimum of exposition.  I’m immersed in the situation and worried about what’s on the other side of the door.  The exposition is limited to how Richie’s mother was killed, which becomes key to understanding this situation.

But the story does more than use this familiar situation as a short cut.  The author very cleverly uses our recognition of the situation, our assumption that we know what has happened and what’s on the other side of the door, to twist all these expectations on their heads.  What at first sounds like a monster on the other side of the door comes to sound like Richie’s mother.  Normally, in such a story, the monster would be pretending to be Richie’s mother, and there would be no suspense in the deception because we wouldn’t be fooled.  But now, because we’ve come into this situation late, because we don’t really know what happened before, whether Richie is hallucinating that a monster killed his mother due to some mental illness or whether a monster that really did kill his mother stands on the other side of the door, the situation creates a lot of suspense.  Maybe there is a monster on the other side of the door.  Or maybe it’s Richie’s mother.

This all works very nicely.  For me, though, the ending, in which Richie decides to open the door, hoping it’s his mother, doesn’t quite work.  Right now, whether Richie decides to open the door or not seems up to the author.  I don’t feel a strong reason why Richie resolves his internal conflict by deciding to open the door.  He’s been fleeing up until this point.  Why would he change?  Just hearing his mother’s voice doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason.  He has previously heard very scary voices that clearly were not his mother.  Why would he believe this voice?  He asks his mother what he should do, abdicating his power at the climax, which isn’t satisfying to the reader.

The downside of inserting us into a familiar situation is that the story depends on its twist to succeed.  And the ending is part of this twist.

There are several possible ways to make Richie’s decision feel both surprising and inevitable, which are the qualities you want to have in a climax.  For example, there might be some piece of evidence that the voice claims proves that Richie is hallucinating.  We might recognize that the evidence doesn’t necessarily prove that; it could also prove the monster is real.  But Richie might believe the evidence proves he’s hallucinating and open the door for that reason.  Another possibility would be to have Richie reason things out, now that he has a moment to think.  If it is his mother on the other side of the door, then he should open the door.  If it’s a monster on the other side of the door, then he lives in a world in which monsters can appear at any moment and kill loved ones, and he is so unfit to deal with this world that all he could do was run and let the monster kill his mother.  In such a world, he can’t survive.  So he might as well open the door.  That way, both possibilities lead to the same decision, so his decision isn’t random.  It’s the only possibility.

As I was writing that, I thought of another possibility.  He’s holding a shard of glass in his hand.  Maybe his thoughts run like this:  If it’s a monster on the other side of the door, he doesn’t want to go out there and be killed by it.  If it’s his mother on the other side of the door, then he’s so mentally unstable he could kill her, thinking she’s the monster, and he doesn’t want to do that.  So he decides to kill himself.

Anyway, those are several possible ways to make his decision at the end feel both surprising and inevitable, and to feel like he’s really making that decision, not leaving it to his mother or to the author.

Other areas I think could be improved are the style and description.  Some unclear or awkward sentences and some unclear details confused and distracted me at times.  For example, I’m kind of confused about what sort of structure he’s inside.  He’s in a warehouse; I would think he’s either in a room with solid walls and a solid door, or he’s in a crate.  But he seems to be in neither, with this rusted sheet metal.  I don’t know what sort of shelf might be in this structure.  At first I picture a piece of wood maybe 3′ x 1′ x 1″ that rests on some brackets fastened to the wall.  But then why is it so heavy?  And how is he moving it?  It’s unclear how this will stop anyone from entering, and I don’t know why he’d get so many splinters that he would bleed.

The glass on the floor seems to appear suddenly.  I think it should be crunching under his feet while he’s looking for something to barricade the door.  And the amount of light in the room seems to change depending on what’s being described.

I have a hard time imagining this voice:  “it’s tongue slithers through every vowel and its jaw pops on every consonant.”

Emotions are told rather than shown at times, which distances us from Richie.  For example, near the end of the story, “The rage and confusion boil inside of me.”  These emotional labels (rage and confusion) are telling us Richie’s emotions.  If they are shown instead, we’ll feel them more strongly.

The description that “Tears stream down my face like a waterfall” feels exaggerated.  I don’t believe the human body has the capability to cry that much, so I’m thrown out of the story here.  Similarly, the image that Richie holds his head in his hands and rocks “it back and forth” doesn’t seem like a natural action.

I hope this is helpful.  I enjoyed reading the story and trying to figure out what was on the other side of the door.

–Jeanne Cavelos, editor, author, director of Odyssey