Brightgloam by Peter S. Drang

This is fun. I like the way it embraces its weirdness—the colors, the shapes and distortions, the synesthesia. There’s an off-the-wall sweetness about the meet-cute and the way the two characters mirror each other’s transformations.

I have some questions about how it all works. Is there any sense of the physical shift? Do people have to adjust to the changes in their bodies? Balance would change, movement would be different. Viewpoints—what happens to vision when both eyes are on the same side? Obviously in a short-short, you won’t want to go into detail, but maybe a line or so, a quick sketch of the feel as well as the smell and taste and sound and sight?

I’m not quite convinced by the beginning of their meeting. It seems as if there needs to be just a hair more to her invitation. A glance, a turn of the head. Some indication as to why she does it. Is it the fact that they’re mirror twins? That she’s looking for a perfect moment, and she believes he’s the perfect one to share it with? Even if it’s pure impulse, it feels as if we need more of a sense of that.

Same applies to the parting. He gets distracted, but why is that a dealbreaker? Is she that strongly opposed to any variation on The Question? If so, why does she agree to meet him again tomorrow? Why not try again today? Why not do a reboot right then and there? What makes it essential that they wait? Can they even trust that the world will be the same, or that they won’t be transformed out of all recognition?

None of this needs a lot of wordage. A line or a phrase would do it. Just a touch of clarity, to make it all shine brighter.

Library Of The Mind by Jamie Boyd

I like the concept of this story. It’s an intriguing direction for psychotherapy to take. I’m particularly moved by the fact that the librarian suffers from dementia: that she’s both therapist and patient.

I have some questions about the patient’s motivations. While the librarian does explain (or seems to) why he’s had his memory wiped, I’m not sure I’m convinced. She lets him think that he’s a therapist in training, but it doesn’t quite make sense for him to have asked to enter the therapy as a blank slate. What would be the advantage of total ignorance? Wouldn’t he want to retain some basics, to hang his therapy on?

Of course the twist is that he’s not a therapist, he’s a patient, and he’s being trained to treat himself. I wonder if there might be just a little more ambiguity in the beginning, a little more questioning on his part—if he’s a trained therapist, why doesn’t he let himself access those skills? Might he start to suspect that something’s off? He does say that he doesn’t feel like a doctor, but I think there could be some more layers to that feeling, some sense that the librarian might be misleading him.

It doesn’t need to be more than a line or two, but I think it would help make his earlier scenes more believable. Then when the twist comes, there’s more of an OH! That makes sense. And then it all falls into place.

The other thing that might bear thinking about is the way the narrative develops. The librarian has a lot of what I call “exposidialogue.” That’s dialogue as exposition. Lecture mode. She tells him what to see and do, and to an extent, what to think.

While he is there to be trained, and she is there as an instructor, I wonder if she might be more indirect in her methods. Set him up in a scene, present the situation, but rather than spelling it out, let him figure it out for himself. Ask rather than tell. Guide him toward his own conclusions.

She does more of this toward the end, but initially she’s almost mechanical in her speech and mannerisms. The prose even points toward it, describing how she prattled on. Could she prattle less and guide more? Or, if he’s perceiving her speech as prattle but it’s actually serving an instructional purpose, maybe he could come to this realization a bit more clearly as the story progresses.

The one last thing I would suggest in the final round of revision is careful attention to the choice of words and constructions. A couple of phrases made me pause:

she said, tsking her mouth into a sympathetic shape.

A tsk is a tongue sound, not a mouth shape. It’s not sympathetic; it’s a way of indicating he’s on the wrong track.

A dimple of approval flashing briefly on her face

Again, not sure the words mean what they want to mean. Dimples tend to be more about humor than approval, and the visual of flashing seems to point more toward some aspect of light than an indentation in the skin.

I didn’t think the ending was overly obvious, by the way. The way the plot was moving, it was inevitable. But that’s what I tend to want out of an ending.

To me this draft reads as if it’s working its way toward completion. Mostly it seems to need more layers and more polish, and some rethinking as to how the story is told, especially when it comes to dialogue.

–Judith Tarr

Hitler’s Lips by RedDwarf Star

“Hitler’s Lips” caught my attention this month with its smart, multilayered dive into social trust and how we see each other as people, not categories. This is a refreshingly humane story, one that observes all kinds of social lines incisively without lashing out at them or falling into sentimentality. More importantly, it does a great job at choosing tools that reflect the story it wants to tell: ones that refract and reflect its themes. So this month, I’d like to talk about how we align our tools with our idea—and how to diagnose the gaps between them.

There’s a lot going on in “Hitler’s Lips”: grief, social ostracism and intimidation on multiple levels, a pandemic in progress—and underpinning them all, how people carry the weight. What makes all that fit into a few thousand words is a keen awareness of structure and how each question can tie into—and play off—each other in a way that feels seamless.

One of the most useful questions I have for thinking about structure is: Does form follow function? Or in other words, are we using tools, structures, word choices, POVs, and worlds with the same attributes as the central idea we want to express? Do the stories we’re telling and the ways we tell those stories have something in common? Readers might not be able to pick out every feature of those common points, but will notice those resonances in a way that feels like good story.

When “Hitler’s Lips” is at its strongest, it’s meeting that question well. As a story about people being more complex, organic, and multilayered than demographics, categories, and shallow assumptions capture, it’s powerful when its techniques reflect that idea: complex, multilayered themes, a non-linear timeline, and actively leveraging and subverting expectations about what a story named for Hitler might do.

The most notable place this works is in the story’s skillful imagery. When Lisa sees Gerald through expectations, she’s looking for swastikas, seeing light like “sepia-toned photographs”, and assuming that Gerald’s lurking and lonely. The language is more than a little loaded and dehumanizing in those moments—and in some wonderfully expressive, inventive, and specific ways: the “obese couch” and panic that smells like raw pork.

This tendency works on the larger scale too: the description of Lisa’s suburban childhood neighbourhood “where the chrome flagpoles beside front doors and the polished metal of cars gave off a hateful glare,” does possibly the most work in the whole piece. It’s a space described in angles and bunkers, red, white, and blue, and imbues the space itself with an unending, oppressive rigidity. It’s very clear how much Lisa feels dehumanized by this environment: how bright, harsh, and unforgiving it is.

But when “Hitler’s Lips” gently strips those expectations back to let the actual people in the room emerge, the language follows it: the all-too-organic description of Gerald’s hands and the deliberately ambiguity Lisa peppers her memory with. There are a few images that follow this progression explicitly: from Gerald’s mask blurring him into an age range instead of an age to Lisa parsing his emotions through it, to the realization that it has been off, and he hasn’t flinched from her naked face. Aside from establishing the very real feeling of front-line jobs during COVID, this creates an active thematic progression through using the same visual in different ways.

Another great example, in this case, is “white-coated professional free of pain”, a phrase that’s blurring the meaning of those first words rather expertly. It evokes both the white coat of a doctor—the literal description—and the idea of a thin coating of whiteness itself, one that ostensibly protects her from harm. Those two words do twice as much work in the same space, and the experience of reading them both ways at once opens the door for a feeling of non-rigidity, ambiguity, context.

What makes this work isn’t just the objective quality of the metaphors and word choice, it’s how those choices change to reflect Lisa’s emotional progress through the story from archetypes and stereotypes—”Dragon Lady Meets Hitler”—to two human beings candidly working the question of how to cope. It’s a shape that resonates with the idea it’s carrying, and that’s what makes it powerful.

Likewise, the places where “Hitler’s Lips” could be strengthened are places where ideas aren’t tied into that progression and structure, where form isn’t quite following function yet. And notably, to my eye, the scenes between when Gerald has his indigestion attack and Lisa’s leaving the house.

This ranges from small thoughts to larger ones. For example, Lisa’s thought about milky eyes and lactose intolerance is one that I’m not sure adds enough, considering the immediacy of the situation—a person in possibly life-threatening pain. It’s a riff on the idea of intolerance, but not one that ties in or pays off, and it’s a new idea introduced right as that idea’s about to change. Because of where it is, the sum total for me was to see it as a distraction, pulling away from the idea that people are the most important thing in a dangerous situation.

That question of danger also can potentially be handled more structurally. Because Gerald’s not in as much danger as Lisa thinks—which highlights that same central themes of assumptions being fatal—there’s a little possible backlash from readers. We’ve been told there’s danger, and then it’s been pulled back just as easily, and this has a chance of damaging readers’ trust in the story.

I don’t think it’s fatal, but I would look carefully at ways to handle that that don’t just have Lisa berating herself as stupid and closing the issue. The symptoms she sees are reasonable symptoms; she has reasons for reacting in the ways she does, and all they need to do is be surfaced well.

There are ways, I think, to tie that incident and her reaction more tightly into her history with the CPR class, her mother’s drowning, her still-fresh grief for her father, the way her brother can’t quite handle the shape of that loss and falls back into childishness. This is less about having more of that information—it’s all there—but just organizing it more mindfully in that part of the story. This is an important moment—important enough that it’s the title of the story—and handling it with more depth and richness, instead of falling back into scripts and shorthands (that she’s stupid) might be a path to making that mini-crisis not feel like a source of tension that was immediately walked back, but like a revelatory piece of character work, and a turning point in the plot.

Finally, as Lisa’s leaving, there are structurally also two emotional payoffs: one where Gerald says that he’d find a way to deal with things if it meant living, and the second around changing his name. From here, they feel like two alternate variations of the same structural scene: Gerald offers Lisa a piece of experience about being strong, taking care of yourself, and perspective that changes how she thinks about her own life. They’re fulfilling, ultimately, the same function.

I’d suggest either choosing between those ways of expressing the structural scene, or combining them in a way that makes them one conversation in one space. It’s a chance to take that little bit of repetition out, and concentrate the impact both of them would have into one space.

The second major place I might suggest for polish is in carrying Lisa’s revelation through structurally. She gains an understanding about being whole, about treating people as they are rather than checkboxes, that there is no such thing as “an accurate census of everyone”, but when she returns to the Census office she’s still thinking of her coworker as “a Nigerian woman”. The form’s not following the function here, in how she thinks of people, and that’s a small contradiction that I think can be worked.

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All in all, what “Hitler’s Lips” has to say for itself is beautiful and necessary: Loss was inevitable. You had to not be reduced by it. Stay whole or try to be so again. It’s a thought that deserves the best framing possible, and I think this one’s almost there. By extending the thinking it’s already using—making the tools match the goals—this has a chance of being wonderfully elegant, and doing some real good for readers.

Thanks for the read, and best of luck!

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

Team MARU by Lyri Ahnam

I really like the premise of this story. The protagonist is strong, with a clearly defined voice. And of course I love Maru.

The opening tries for fast pacing and taut tension, and mostly succeeds. By the time Starling kills the snake, the pacing has slowed down and the exposition has ramped up. The trek from the lab to the base camp has a tendency to focus on nonessential details, with a fair amount of repetition: Maru’s claws on Starling’s skin, Starling’s genetically engineered status, her prolonged deafness after the blast.

Her passage through the camp is remarkably easy, as is her escape in the General’s plane. There don’t appear to be any people in the camp except for the Eyes, who don’t catch on at all to the fact that she’s not one of their superior officers. She escapes with ease. There’s no pursuit, and she waits a considerable while to disconnect the black box and dump the stolen com. Then it’s off to the next mission, cat in tow.

I have a number of suggestions for revisions. While the prose could be tightened quite a bit to meet the goal of 5000 words (and actually come in a fair bit under), I think the emphasis for now should be on the structure of the story.

First, I would recommend moving a good chunk of the exposition from the second half, and especially the final third, to the earlier part of the story. Tighten, pare, and streamline these passages, and weave them into Starling’s escape from the lab and her trek to the base camp. Give us quick, concise references to Starling’s past and especially her relationship with General Dikson, to Gem’s past and her mission at the lab, and make it clearer why she’s killed herself. A line here and there in the action sequence at the beginning, then further clarification as Starling makes her escape and processes (or doesn’t) her grief.

By the time she gets to the base camp, the reader should have a pretty good sense of who she is, who Gem was, and what their mission is. I’d like to be clearer on how their arcs connect, too. Are they allies? Are they working for the same forces? Are their goals the same? Some of that is in the draft, but I think it needs more.

During her trek Starling deals with obstacles and evades pursuit, but once she’s in the base camp, that mostly disappears. Her passage through the camp and her escape should be messier and more complicated. There’s room for that once the esposition and backstory are streamlined and moved to earlier scenes.

I think too that she might have a stronger sense of purpose, more of a defined mission. Instead of more or less randomly coming across the camp, she might be looking for something like it—the pursuit has to come from somewhere. It almost might be less of a coincidence that Dikson shows up. Could she be looking for the source of the surveillance, and have reason to suspect that it’s someone she knows from her own past?

Her escape could have more sense of purpose, too. Would she have a goal, a place to be? In the draft, she’s just running, evading pursuit. She could be aiming in a particular direction, or thinking about where to go next. In short—more overall sense of mission, and more purpose in what she does.

The same, I think, applies to Maru. Starling says she’s not a cat person, but Gem entrusted the cat to her. It’s an act of love and tribute to honor Gem’s last wishes. But since she is in the story, and since every element of a short story ought to earn its keep, could Maru play a greater part in the development of the plot?

It doesn’t have to be a whole new plot-thing. But Maru is remarkably docile for a cat, and stays remarkably close to Starling, who is not her human. Can that be turned to advantage in some way? If she’s genetically engineered, is there some useful thing she can do to help Starling accomplish her mission? Can she alert Starling to threats, serve as ears while her own are damaged, help her find the base camp? Might her hunting skills come in handy in the camp, or for that matter, could her cuteness be weaponized to distract camp personnel from Starling’s campaign of sabotage?

Not to mention that she has actual weapons in the form of claws. She uses them freely on Starling. Could they be aimed at others as well?

The title of the story after all is “Team Maru.” Maybe think about how to weave that concept more strongly into the plot, and make Maru a fully contributing member of the team. Even if Starling wants to stow her out of the way in the camp, she could escape and do something helpful, possibly something that Gem taught her to do, or that she was programmed to do by whoever grew her in the vat. There’s a lot a cat can do to turn military order into chaos.

Best of luck, and happy revising!

— Judith Tarr

Reflections On The Anniversary Of My Descent, Chapter 1 by Kell Shaw

In response to the question in the author’s note, for me there’s enough mystery and ambiguity especially toward the end, that I’d keep reading to find out what happens. The concept is interesting and I like the idea of a dispatch from beyond the grave.

What I’d like to talk about for this Editor’s Choice is a more general topic: distancing and filters. At first I thought I’d call it passive writing, but it’s more complex than that. It’s a tendency to separate the reader from the narrative and the characters through the use of passive voice and temporizing constructions.

Passive voice is a powerful tool. When the subject drops out of the discourse, when actions happen without an agent, the story takes a step away from immediate and lived experience. It’s filtered. Emotion is muted, tension weakened.

When it’s deliberate and calculated, it excludes the reader from the direct experience. It can twist the meaning in subtle and even pernicious ways. “A shot was fired” as opposed to “X shot Y.” X and Y are no longer there. It’s just the shot, exploding in empty space.

Passive prose isn’t only the direct use of the passive voice. It creeps in through the use of passive or distanced constructions. I am by no means opposed to the use of was and were and their relatives, but when they show up frequently and to the exclusion of active constructions, the cumulative effect is to distance the reader from the characters and the story.

Look at this progression:

There were several useful things I should have done.

Then a little later:

There were two more. One was a guy watching everything

And shortly thereafter:

That was the three of them

There are active bits in between these passages, but the repetition of there were/that was adds up. Think about how to shift the discourse toward the active. “I could have done several things.” “I saw two more. One was watching everything.” And maybe the third doesn’t need to be there; it’s already clear that there are three.

A similar thing happens with temporizing phrases. They seem to be an attempt to make the narrative more conversational, to establish that the narrator is telling a story in an oral-ish style. What mostly happens however is that the narrator inserts herself between the reader and the story.

Here at the beginning:

well! I pulled through

Does “well!” add anything to the story? Does it need to be there?

C’mon—the Dark Emperor’s insignia?

Here too. Is “c’mon” necessary?

Another form of temporizing is the use of negatives or inherent contradictions:

And it’s not because I have a genetic demon dad—it’s because…

Or here:

Like I was going to lie quietly while they cut me. Instead…

Such constructions can make the reader feel as they’re being pushed away from the direct action. The emotional affect flattens and the pacing slows down. Again, as with passive constructions in general, a little can go a long way and be very effective in setting up a contrast between the predominantly active narration and the brief shift to a more filtered experience. It’s what horse riders call a half-halt: a pause, a brief break in the movement. But too many half-halts can stop the movement altogether.

One last thing to watch for is the tendency to minimize a particular action or line of thought. It often expresses itself as some version of the phrase,

I didn’t have time to worry about that.

What this tells the reader is that the information they’ve just been given is not relevant. It erodes their trust in the narrator. If she’s explicitly not giving them the information they do need in order to understand what’s going on, how much of the rest is relevant, either?

All of this, when done deftly and deliberately, can make the story stronger. An unreliable narrator can be fascinating. But it has to be careful and intentional and above all, sparing in its use. A little goes a long way.

–Judith Tarr

Saints of Flesh, Chapter 1 by Tim W. Burke

The bones of this chapter are solid. There are some vivid and memorable images, and the story moves rapidly forward. Olivia is a strong character; her motivations are clear. There’s no question about what she wants or how she intends to get it.

My main questions have to do with the prose. It wants to be powerful and evocative, and it does achieve this to a degree—especially at the very end of the submission. That last sentence is just right.

Often however it doesn’t quite hit its mark. Phrasing can be awkward or syntactically incorrect:

It stabbed and scraped and sliced her from self-loathing.

The “from” is hard to parse. Sliced her away from it? Kept her from hating herself? Or is it meant to be “out of,” as the reason for the stabbing and the rest?

as he smiled back up to me

Should this be “back up at me”?

Sometimes images are odd or confusing:

every moment savored like a coming thunderstorm

The mixed metaphor acts like a speed bump—the reader has to stop to figure it out. Savoring the moment, that makes sense, but how does it connect with a potential weather event? How do they fit together?

Gretchen’s aura drooped with icicle prickles.

A similar thing happens here. How does an aura droop? And how do icicles prickle? Or droop?

The air stung of stale incense and alcohol.

Here too, the metaphor starts in one place and ends up in another. Or is it a typo? Is it meant to be the ungrammatical stunk, meaning stank?

Heart squirting with alarm

I’m not sure what the image is here. Squirting blood? Squeezing like the digestion a few paragraphs later? Is this another typo, or a word that isn’t quite the right one?

Some habits might bear rethinking, too. There’s a tendency to undercut an image:

a seemingly regretful glance, for example, or

He seemed spiteful for some reason

The context would be clearer and the emotional impact more effective without the qualifiers.

The underpinnings are there. It’s pretty clear what the characters’ arcs are and where they’re headed. Once the prose is tightened and clarified and the words and images are under control, both the story and the characters will come through more strongly.

— Judith Tarr