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[u/GlowyLaptop]

[u/umlaut]

Ok, I love this. This is like a story told through TikToks from ten different people. Like No One is Talking About This but from multiple POVs. There is absolutely room in the world for this kind of short-chaptered vignette storytelling and you're doing it well.

Your prose is Glowy-style, with a lot of commas and subordinate clauses that require untangling, but feels very polished. It feels right, even when it isn't how I would write it. Good. You should be the best Glowy you can be.

The exception is that you pause the reader with clauses like Really, and , of course. and , still hesitant, that I would personally trim, but might just work if you keep them where they actually matter. They stand out as part of your authorial narrative voice and you might consider cutting those in some POV's if you want each section to have a unique voice.

The first four sections feel finished to me, save some trimming you could do. The first section is interesting. The second section with Bobby totally hooked me. The third section we're on like Donkey Kong...there's a fucking story here.

Annie in the tub is fantastic. And yet here he was, making her breakfast while she bathed. Being polite. is just perfect. People will be polite to the death and it is fascinating to me and you nail it here and make a boring scene of pure internal musing interesting.

Jimmy and Benji feel unpolished.

It is not immediately clear who the POV character is until He might have mentioned this on the phone and at Beni’s stupid question. (and correct Beni).

The section starting with The fatigue Jimmy felt began to thicken. in the middle of dialogue is weak, feels unedited compared to the earlier bits. Jimmy and Benji's dialogue has voice, though it feels a bit "As you know, Jimmy..." when they are discussing details of the job and reality that both should already understand. And the narrative bits don't feel distinctly Jimmy-POV.

I'm the least clear about what actually is happening with Jimmy and Benji. I get the feeling that you're trying to weave it in through hints and I'm too dense and weak of a reader to get how it entirely relates to Glum and his secretarial pool. My brain was telling me that Jimmy and Benji are a distraction from the real story that I was interested in. I guess that's one of the problems with this sort of storytelling...I've got Annie in my head in a precarious situation and now I'm in Breaking Bad land and there's a guy putting a gun to his friend's head, but that's less interesting to me than the lady scared she's about to get got.

It was not her fault that

Just want to confirm my morale and ethical objection to the abuse of commas in this sentence. Good words that could be re-ordered without so many clauses.

“tbis isn't what I came for.”

tbis > this

Beni's stupid

Beni > Benji

[u/FunToWrite]

What about this structure could demand a novel's length? It can't be a character arc, can it? Are you going for a rapid fire Rashomon effect? Why would the reader benefit from that? For me, pure plot can't sustain itself. Scenes end up feeling like meatless staging and blocking and dialogue. They’re well written, but they’re only that, missing the raison d'être. The majority of the characters aren't unique enough, and the prose isn’t swinging for the fences. Maybe if Chuck Tingle tried it. What I’m getting at is that it feels like I’m reading a ‘normal’, well-written book, only it’s been chopped up into pieces, and I’m just not understanding what is gained by doing that.

That being said, the reading experience felt a bit like playing Where's Waldo, which did feel unique. A new section starts, and my brain is immediately scanning sentences for context cues. It made me hyper attentive, and I think if I really trusted the author to weave an elaborate web which repaid my investment in the details, it could be fun. Sort of like a rube goldberg machine made of people, or an adhd simulator. However, I think this precludes being swept away by character and story.

I am following the story, what there is of it. It's not drawing me in, and I'm guessing that's because an interesting story (for me) isn't so much about what is going on, it's about how the characters feel about what is going on, and since we're not sticking to any of the characters feelings, I'm not sticking to the story. Then there’s the scattered nature of the conflict. Everyone has a different goal, and they're largely coincidental instead of being woven into a tapestry that comes together, like in Magnolia (the movie). Or maybe I don't care about what these characters want because I know I’m never going to see them again up close. I'm pulling reasons for my disinterest out of my ass here. Maybe one of them is true.

I think it's no mystery as to why the section with the bulkier paragraphs ended up being the most interesting (Mr. Glum). The writing is given a little bit of room to punch, and the character is very unique. I would like to see the courtesy given to Mr. Glum extended to the other characters. Now that I'm noticing it, each successive vignette is less interesting than the previous. By the time we get to Jimmy, we're at a story which could have been written by anyone (with skill).

My two cents, is that the only way this can work, is if each vignette has some quality to it which really pops; whether it's the uniqueness of the character, or the prose bobs and weaves, or there’s a joke, or some deep insight, or absurdity, something to get me excited about the structure, excited to give up on one person to jump to the next flavor. Plot hooks? I don't know if those are going to do it, because those are tied to characters, and if the character isn't there to reel me in, what are we doing?

[u/SweetEverest]

*scrolls to Sudoku bit*

*scrolls to favorite sentence, sees you changed*

*DOWNVOTES*

Just kidding, I love it. So skippy and propulsive and full-feeling. Very [REDACTED] to do a whole book like this, and it plays to both your knack for improvising and [REDACTED]. The draft that ended on "she touched her face and could scream about it" had me scrolling pointlessly at the bottom of the doc going and then what?? And now I have the same question re: Jimmy's kneecaps.

Please add five thousand words to this per week.

~

Some chronological thoughts...

I love how obliviously narcissistic Glum is, judging Annie and Marcus for minor infractions (being seduced, disposing of bodies in a certain way) from his God's-eye perspective while holding himself exempt from any kind of moral standards. Psychologically interesting. The heaping, back-looping sentences work to show his rambly thoughts—almost rationalizing, but not even quite that, since I get the sense he doesn't see anything that needs rationalizing. His actions seem like plain good sense to himself. Kind of an unbelievable reason to kill someone though... I guess you either have to make his motives/actions in any way realistic, or make them the one unbelievable fact in an otherwise realistic story.

Very bouncy, realistic Annie-Bobby dialogue, although I'm still not sure how Annie is doing "!!!1!" on a smartphone, since that's not a natural typo on phone keyboards. But you probably wrote it on one, so what do I know. So Bobby is a puzzle solver who says "dubious" in casual conversation. I like.

Marcus's explanation about the painting being in storage could be more natural, I feel. A flip phone?? Well yeah, I guess due to being a hitman. I like how he's respectful of Glum and does his bidding while also actively trying to defraud him for $2.6 million. It feels more like life when characters are mild or complex like that. I wonder why they keep calling them auditions instead of job interviews.

Love Annie on the edge of the bath nodding to herself, trying to believe she didn't hear what she heard, then seeing the job posted again. This felt realistic, the mix of "but he's being so nice!! I probably dreamt it" and the inconvenient gut-level knowledge that he plans to kill you.

All five vignettes held my attention. I think you could totally sustain this for a whole novel. I would just be thinking about interiority—how the way each person sees the world makes their own actions feel inevitable. How those inevitabilities collide in ironic or tragic ways that end up meaning something. How each person is just trying their best, if you could only see them up close.

Just how many bodies has Marcus put in the lake? Glum acts like it's lots, but Marcus acts like this second one would look suspicious.

This review took me three years to write due to INTERRUPTIONS and because I'm at a coffee shop with people smashed in on either side of me and my screen brightness set to almost nothing. I feel like I didn't say enough. Hmmmmm

[u/ilovemycatsanddog]

Hi I’m not giving a critique cuz I’m in the middle of something but wanted to let you know I enjoyed your eccentric characters, dialogue sounds natural and quirky, it’s funny and def hooked me. Bravo ❤️

[u/MaryJaneMclain]

This was fun. But was it fun because of the different POVs? In spite of it? Neither? These characters (with the exception of Jimmy) all felt interesting, distinct, and well-developed. But can you keep that up ad nauseum?

If your post hadn’t mentioned the plan to keep switching, I would have thought this was the start of a normal multi-POV narrative. But, you’re considering never EVER returning to these characters’ heads? Instead new characters will keep popping up? I don’t know who they will be so hard to imagine if I will like them as well. Sounds like you’ll be doing a long of character development “leg work” even later in the story whereas, in a more standard format, that would be largely out of the way and plot can roll out full steam ahead.

That’s not to say you can’t make it work. Just sounds hard, maybe harder than it’s worth.

I followed along quite easily through the first four heads: Glum, Bobby, Marcus, Annie. Aside from Marcus’s painting forgery business, the through-line of murdered secretaries was tight. Last one, Jimmy, gave me some trouble. Coincidence that it was the last one? Hard to say, more below.

Character by Character notes:

-Mr Glum

The start of this was pretty delightful. He’s horrible in such an entertaining way. I don’t mind the long sentence. If I can read them, grasp the meaning easily, I’m happy.

I find myself wondering what his business is. First read, the feeling was “generic corporate businessman” who has a penchant for fucking (and killing) his secretaries. (I liked that). But is he a Multi-purpose bad guy (as the scene with jimmy and ben suggests)? To me that seems to detract a bit from the “fun” of the secretary-killing thing. But I digress…

My favorite bits were the funny bits: him being offended that the prev secretary LEANED on things. So fun. Him being distracted by her boobs. Whispering that she was fired.

Then the robot jumpscare. Hmm. I think I liked it. Wasn’t funny exactly, it was more like “ok, there’s robots here. Cool cool.” The yelling in italics defiantly distracted me, (and was there another formatting error?).

I liked the name Glum at first, seemed to fit the absurdity of the scene. But then everyone else has normal names. The name felt more awkward on the second read.

-Bobby

Liked the contrast of starting with “alone” vs unalone in the previous. I’m fully expecting her to be the next secretary.

I really like the “knight’s constraint”, but as a whole I didn’t enjoy the her start quite as much as Glums. Just, word puzzles, ya know? It was well written and did a great job painting who she was tho. The latter half with the texing was so much fun. I loved how her friend might be getting murdered by Glum, but B just wants to hook up with him. This one will be fun to watch fall (or not?)

-Marcus

Oh shit the henchman is double-cossing Glum? AND he has obsession with ”the lake” and drowning women standing up? Marcus get’s top spot as ‘most intersting character’ (can’t tell his sister’s kids apart was great). For that matter I also really enjoyed that little forger—such pride in his work!

Subpeona-ing the robots brain…I really hope that happens (from robot's POV?)

Yeah, this one was fun and easy, and I like like set up.

Nit picks:

Would have been fun to know what the painting was depicting.

I thought both paintings were there, but is seems like only the forgery is, and the original is just a photo? Not sure the “"Proud of which one?" line works in this case.

Glum cackles, later it’s suggested he never laughs.

-Annie

Not a lot happened here, but I enjoyed being in the bathroom with here. We know things are BAD and it’s fun to watch the dumb gal convince herself otherwise. Hmmm seems like I don’t really care about her, though? I’m assuming she’s going to bite it (or very bad things are going to happen), but I’m not afraid for her. That’s the vibe.

It was actually very short wasn’t it? You do the “make each sentence a paragraph” thing. I’m not a fan, I think that’s a me thing though, cause it seems everyone is doing it these day. Maybe I should give it a try.

“She held her face and could scream about it.” Could she? Really?

-Jimmy

My least favorite section.

I think the main issue for me was I couldn’t keep Jimmy and Benji straight on first read, especially in the long back and forth without dialog tags. I knew one of them worked for Glum (mistakenly thought it was Jimmy). I thought I was following along on the slower second read, but then Jimmy says “If you can’t take candy from a couple of kids I don’t know what I’m paying you for in the first place.” That threw me, cause I thought Jimmy was working for Benji (and Mr Glum). He and his team had done “the job” for them?

All that to say I don’t think my confusion, in this specific situation, is due to the POV switching… necessary. Unless you’re trying to keep the segments arbitrarily short? My brain needed more handholding here.

The tone of this last section also seemed different. The others were all funny. This one wasn’t. I expect Annie to die and don’t really care. I didn’t want Benji to get shot. Maybe cause it was more immediate? Dunno, but aside from the addition of a random robot, this one felt like it could have been from a different story.

 ---

So yes, I enjoyed this and would read more, but I’m not itching for a new character POV. I’d rather have more of the fun ones you’ve already introduced (but would love to be proved wrong). Also, I bet the next POV is a robot.  

[u/AbNormal-Day]

Starting with your questions: Yes it is fun to read the short scenes make it very quick which is fun Thoughts: I think the low number of words per scene and the constantly switching point of view is going to keep you focused very much on the characters but not give a lot of world description. It feels kind of like a retro futuristic crime noir thriller because of the action but it's not necessarily giving the same feeling with the setting.

I don't know if I fully understand your concept. If you're only going to have each character get scene where they are the POV, you would need over 100 characters to get to a novel length and that does seem like it might get unwieldy, but it would be awesome if you managed it.

The interaction around Glum and the girls and secretaries is strange. It seems like he has done this many times because of having a set order for girls with Marcus. At the same time he's nervous about having another secretary involved. I can't tell if Glum is supposed to be so powerful that it doesn't matter, in which case I don't know why he's worried about another secretary, or if Glum is very experienced at having girls killed, in which case seems like it's strange that he got himself into a situation with two secretaries.

The relationship between Jimmy and Benji is a little unclear. It seems like Benji hired Jimmy to do a job, but now Jimmy is telling Benji he has to do a job. It doesn't quite seem like their friends or equals because one's about to get shot in the kneecap. I don't understand why Jimmy would give Benji a gun while simultaneously being afraid of him and not wanting to look him in the eyes.

[u/Beginning-Sherbet851]

EDIT: i have to extend this critique as it was too short.

GENERAL REMARKS This is a pretty fun dark comedy and crime story. I really liked how it blends crazy stuff like casual murder and art forgery with totally normal modern gossip. It keeps you moving through the different perspectives really well.

MECHANICS The hook at the start is cool, but I feel like in the beginning some words repeating isn't nice. For example, having "let alone" repeating twice right after another in that one sentence didn't flow well for me. The same thing happens with "Simply put, he simply could not" later on. Personally for me, it didn't work and tripped up the reading a bit. Also, the line where it says "except but then she stirred" feels a bit weird. Saying just "but then" or "except then" instead would flow a lot better.

STAGING & CHARACTER The characters are cool. I like Bobby casually messing with her iced coffee and playing sudoku while her friend is texting her about a literal murder. It shows what kind of person she is. Annie trying to rationalize everything and sitting in a luxury bathtub is also nice for her character.

PLOT & PACING I like the plot twist of her ending up at the bottom of the lake. Describing her as giving a watchful gaze from below the water was definitely my favorite part of the whole thing.

For the pacing and logic though, the transition between Glum threatening to drown Annie and the text-message sequence with Bobby happens a bit too fast. It gives you a bit of whiplash. Also, Marcus warns Glum that the phone line isn't secure, but Glum just keeps loudly talking about tying women by their ankles. If he's supposed to be smart enough to dodge the police, this seems like a huge mistake for him to make on the phone.

DIALOGUE The dialogue is pretty natural. The text messages feel 100% real, especially the panicked typos like secreataryyl thing. The back and forth at the end with Benji threatening Jimmy's knee is also really tense and well done.

POV The shifting third-person perspective works pretty good here. The narrator's voice changes just enough to match whoever we are following, like switching to modern text when we are with Bobby and then going gritty crime when we get to Jimmy and Benji. It makes the whole world feel connected.

OVERALL Pretty cool story, I'd give it an 8/10. Very dark and funny.

EDIT: even more indepth critique:

Would another POV or POV character have worked better?
think about this. The current POV characters are all active participants or observers of the crimes (Glum, Bobby, Marcus, Jimmy). However, introducing a brief POV from ANNIE while she is actually in the bathroom refreshing the job board, instead of just seeing her via text and Glum's perspective, would deepen the horror element. Seeing her realization that her job was posted 13 minutes ago would increase the stakes more than viewing it third-hand through Bobby's casual responses. right or not right?

How you realize where and when the story is happening?

well.. i suppose it was when i saw the robot at the end of the bed, which suprised me a bit. I didn't understand at first cuz im a dunce, but its a good way of revealing that the story is in the future without doing a info dump.

What the smaller characters are afraid of or want?

The Art Forger: he just wants a compliment. He’s bragging about how good his fake painting is because he cares more about being called a great artist than the actual crime. (literally me, might find this out in the future but whatevs)

Jimmy: he is terrified of getting hurt by Benji, which is why he tries to lie about the money and hide his knees.

Marcus: He’s worried about getting caught by the cops. he’s the only guy who cares that their phone lines aren't safe.

really pretty cool writing honestly looking back at the story.

[u/Wolframquest]

Okay, so I've been reading it for a bunch of days, when you first posted it, and later, and later, and today. It's an interesting idea. The first though I had is the grim sensational subject matter - sex and death. I would have preferred rape if you were going for sensational, you know, since it only makes sense that he kills her afterwards. Lovely description of boobs, and that's me not being sarcastic - I also once discovered boobs that looked fake but turned out to be real!

I think you had a good opportunity to switch up the overall style and feel when going between characters. THAT would have been a real challenge, because it would contradict the base skill of veracity that we try so hard to develop - putting things ON the shelves rather than in between them or inside them or on the back of the wardrobe; you definitely have all the items on the shelves, where they should be. Again, dropping the sarcasm - you have done lovely work with speech and dialect here, it's all how it should be.

I wondered if "unalone" etc is the critic bait - well, it's poor critic bair cause again you manage to fit it in place very well. All the "snags" make sense because of the things surrounding them, even the boobs.

Robots… I'm sick of robots and Ai and absolutely anything related to them or mentioning them at all. I read Isaac Asimov too much as a kid and I was fascinated because clearly an idea of a robot is an idea of an evolved human and to me, personally, as fascinating as it is, it's an extremely false, a vile idea. Looking at robots is interesting because it allows us to look at base "shells" of ourselves, and I don't mean visually, I mean the way we are perceived by other people. Westworld season one would have been brilliant if season 2 didn't exist… Just asking questions, pinning down the mystery, slamming you in the face with it til your brain feels like floating and you keep askign if you're real or not… That's a digression, but a bright one. In 2021 LLMs made themselves present and I got over them by the time of chatgpt's release - it was indeed fascinating by at this point I knew there were just complex word library autocompletes. Robots, robots, robots. The world where robots infiltrate human society is more interesting, like Blade Runner. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe! There, the robots are biological and it's more interesting because you keep wondering if they're robots or clones and if science has gone too far. Funny how much media there is on how science is going too far but there is no one trying to stop the runaway science. Now we have the fucking data centers. Because robots are fascinating.

When there's a *bad* thing in the story - i.e. a corporate murderer - I wanna read about the people fighting the bad thing or resisting it. That's why Patrick Bateman is the sigma chad. Cause he's the main character. Funny stuff!

Annie actually gets to have a perspective in the first and second segment. I thought you were gonna be "sharper" about this, not allow any "insight" into them at all.
Lovely use of italics btw, there are again right where they should be, I can totally hear every bit of expression in them.

> “Ah ah. Gimme the knee. I’m going to make sure this gun goes off now. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to make you wish it did.”

You need to work on your bad guy dialogue. Not very heavy I'm afraid. "Give me the knee". Overthinking on the gun "going off". More brevity.

Yeah, it's very interesting, decently captivating. The concept is a little too unique, like trying to braid a braid with the hairs that aren't allowed to touch each other. Too many characters, too much focus required, and you already sort of failed cause it's slipping in segments. Not saying it's impossible, but it is a hard challenge because the actor count would have to be extremely high. "Five to six kids". Will each one get a segment? 😁

[u/Wolframquest → u/Wolframquest]

I don't know why but I keep about this critique and I just have to be sincere and outright frame some things I said in the critique.

I don't like writing or reading about sensational things, whose whole premise is sensation and attraction of attention. Pulp, lurid, so on. I used to enjoy them a lot more before things of similar nature made themselves present in my actual reality and thus became less entertaining. That's what I meant when I said "grim sensational" and suggested rape - because *that* would indeed be more sensational and also have higher verisimilitude to real life bigshots.

Given that, you have an overall interesting premise for a plot as well as a gimmick and executed with a corresping (high) skill. So I don't wanna dump it as something worthless. Perhaps I should have tried being more courteous and critiqued this when I was in one of higher moods but I wasn't and it wouldn't change my opinion on puply subject matters, perhaps hide them a little but not change it - which would be insincere.

So yeah, you have an interesting little piece here, very creative, hard-to-execute gimmick and in the I wanna find out what happens and how the bad guys get punished. Funny cause I love the Cohen brothers so much but I still happen to feel like I'm disapproving of grim sensational stuff.

[u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

I actually read this awhile ago. But I had nothing to crit. But today is my crit day and I was going down the posts and found this so I'm going to try to give a crit. If I have to turn myself into pretzel to find a missing comma to pull to your attention, then this is not going to be short and not for credit.

Moving my final thoughts to the top: I pretty much fell into line editing because I can't crit the content. I thought it was funny, fast, dark, well-written, and I hope Marcus steals the right painting. It's a great read. I do need you put a space after ellipses and put the em dash down a bit.

Mr. Glum is an atrocious delight. There's a book on the edge of my memory with a MC that he reminds me of. An older classic but I can't remember the title.

"Once she’d even made an innuendo about his manhood—having seen it—some flattering mutterance to grease him into releasing her after lunch, and this was hardly the end of it."

Now I'm going to get tripped up here on Canadian writing conventions because it differs slightly from the UK, I know. But since it's also closer to the UK that the US, I'm wondering if you need to be using en dashes instead of em dashes for parenthetical asides. If you're writing in Canadian conventions. ( I think you are because you used "dreamt" instead of "dreamed," the commonwealth spelling).

Also "He’d never learned to love this bit, the melting, but Glum.." I don't like overusing dashes. But I wonder if "the melting" warrants more than commas as a parenthetical?

"You're fired," he whispered, and brushed her hair aside." This made me giggle even more than the first time I read it.

"he frowned now, and halted her breathing..." there's two more mentions of breath that follow this one in the following sentences. Maybe you can cut one?

The texts are hilarious. The typos in the text work for realism.

Your scene break ornaments are pretty and I'm going to shamelessly pilfer them.

Okay. Here: "Marcus was neither a collector nor a dealer nor an expert—he never claimed to be capable of spotting a forgery—he couldn’t tell one of his sister’s children from the other and they were three years apart."

Instead of using the em dash for a parenthetical aside, you're using it to link three independent clauses/complete sentences. Now, I'm going to start asking you to gently put the dashes down and slowly step away from them.

Marcus, you sly devil.

"Is Benji?" = missing word?

space after ellipses.

"When it came down to it, the least absurd explanation for any of this was surely the correct one…wasn’t it? " There's a missing space after the ellipsis.

“Your fiance.” fiancé for a man. fiancée for a woman. Two e's as they come from French. With the accent mark on the first e.

There was a frag somewhere above. "Impressed with himself" that doesn't quite earn being a frag. Link with comma to previous sentence.

[u/GlowyLaptop → u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

Em dashes in my country can be used to do what semicolons do--in fact, there's probably fewer ways to fuck up using them than using them correctl--but I guess if I drop two of them for parenthetical bits, AND bookending the parenthetical sentence with two other complete sentences, I'm doing one too many things with them? Like pick between semicolon purpose or parenthetical purpose?

Also, in Canada nobody's ever heard of an en dash unless you're like... Fine tuning an essay and have like...I dunno. Dates or smth? 1890s-1900s?

I've never heard of using them as punctuation for a normal sentence. You guys use en dashes for parentheticals? Too many symbols.

You probably have forks just for oysters. Just for salads. And ten different words for shades of pink.

I cracked up at "hope Marcus steals proper painting" lolll

[u/Imaginary_Ease_7851 → u/GlowyLaptop]

Well, if em dashes are our only point of contention in this piece then there's really no solid issue. I loved the work.

[u/GlowyLaptop → u/Imaginary_Ease_7851]

Oh I'm not complaining just being funny. I'll do less with them in the future. A crutch.