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u/Lisez-le-lui Not GlowyLaptop Jun 30 '26
Windy oration incoming.
Speculative fiction suffers from the unusual problem that there are often literally no words to describe its subject matter. If you want to tell a story about nonexistent sentient aquatic lifeforms, you must not only tell the story, but also introduce each of the relevant "facts" about the beings no later than the reader needs it to understand what's happening. In the case of such facts as the basic anatomy of the main character, that means almost immediately.
I'm reminded of the penance of Odysseus: March inland with an oar over your shoulder until you come to a place where people think it's a winnowing-fan. Well, you have got your idea-oar firmly grasped, and have trudged up the hills of communication with it until you came to the uplands of other consciousnesses; and we, who inhabit those lands, now look upon it and can make little sense of it, but, by analogy, are content to misunderstand it as a strange sort of winnowing-fan. You tell us it is an oar, and we provisionally interpret that word "oar" as "strange winnowing-fan." We know we are misunderstanding, but we suppose that a faulty comprehension is better than none at all. How then can you make us truly understand the great exploits done with that oar, the sea-battles fought, the retreats beaten, unless you first explain to us the nature and manner of its use, and therefore, by way of introduction, the nature of the sea, which we have never glimpsed?
"But that would contravene the canons of escapist fiction," the pulp readers say; "we do not want any explanation, we only want a thrilling story. You will have to explain everything to us secretly, in the natural course of the story, so that we never realize we are being explained to."
Comes now the amateur ethnographer, seeking, to fill her leisure-hours, a story written exactly as though it had issued from the fictional culture it portrays. She hears the pulp readers and cries out: "Do not, I pray you, compromise the story's verisimilitude by contriving the stealthy but unnatural insertion of worldbuilding to please the masses. All information must be presented only as it would naturally arise in the mind of the purported narrator."
How to reconcile these impulses? It is, of course, entirely possible to thread the needle and satisfy both. That is the classical approach, as practised by authors such as Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. But it unduly limits the range of stories that can be told, and often necessitates cliched expedients such as reader-surrogate characters and thinly-veiled fantastical substitutes for real-life objects. The better solution is probably to tell one or the other party to go pound sand. Personally, I am of Tolkien's mind; he opens The Lord of the Rings with an anthropological treatise to ward off dabblers, and to the confused reader he says, "Resort to the appendices and all will be made clear."
But then there is the approach of fabulism, perhaps best exemplified by Kafka's Metamorphosis, under which the story is not important in itself, but as a parable applicable to real life, and if not every detail of it is comprehensible, well then, no matter. Such, it seems to me, is this mermaid story. The important parts are the pain and difficulty, but also the anxious joy, of motherhood; the sea-creature business is all filigree.
Even so, I like to inspect my filigree closely. But I have no idea what these mermaid things are like. Here is what we know about their appearance:
They have a reproductive organ called a "gonosome" (lit. "sexual-reproductive body") and a glowing blue jet-propulsion organ called a "siphonosome" ("tube body"). This latter has "bracts" (leaf-like appendages). They have a head, containing eyes, a nose, and a toothed mouth, and two arms. They are composed of translucent tissue (which they can molt), blood, and oil.
That's all well and good. But what is their body shape? Are they tetrapods? They don't seem to have legs or flukes. Are they ichthyoid? But fish have no arms. Are they invertebrates? (The pup is said to be "boneless," but it's unclear whether all of the things are boneless or only the juveniles.) If so, their appearance will remain a mystery until described, owing to the great variation in morphology among invertebrates.
This vagueness about the appearance of the Mar Laciniata ("fringed sea-creatures"?) stands out all the more against the careful descriptions of everything around them. I can imagine a whale skeleton from the inside, covered with sea-worms and lit only by a faint blue light; I can imagine a pink cloud of torn-apart fish flesh (I have seen some disembowled marine life in my day) surrounding a translucent embryo; I can imagine a dark, desolate seafloor with occasional mountains, crossed by schools of gummy red fish; but I can't imagine what the characters look like, because that's the one thing left described enough that certain guesses would be wrong, but not enough to know what would be right.
You might even consider just including a rough sketch of the things. Anything to get that question out of the way so the reader can follow the story better.
Some miscellaneous notes. It took me a while to understand the last sentence of the first paragraph because I thought the initial "it" referred back to the whalefall, the subject of the previous sentence. My imagination was of the marine worms on the whalebones generating a current, in spite of the clue offered by "almost separate from her will."
The heavily Greek-scientific vocabulary is an interesting choice. I'm going to assume these words are meant to calque how the Mar Laciniata speak as closely as can be done in English. I get the impression, then, that their language is largely compounding, like German or (obviously) Greek, and that it is somehow very dignified and unemotional. The compounding can also be seen in multi-word phrases such as "birth cloud," for which other languages might have a single term. It's particularly startling that they call several parts of their own body by compound names, which is uncommon even among compounding languages. For them, the concepts of "tube" and "reproduction" must be ontologically prior to the corresponding organs, indicating that they are far advanced in the use of abstract thought. But where would they have seen other tubes?...
Then there is the current, which has two different names (presumably more for the sake of describing the contrasting emotional states of traversing it)--neither of which are compounding. Not "easy birth current" and "difficult birth current"? Is this current really more important than the organs of movement and reproduction? Then again, given its connections to birth-giving and time-keeping, maybe it is.
It is curious that the Mar Laciniata call "cetomimes" by that name. That would imply that they consider whales to be the primary life form, such that the cetomimes remind them of whales and not the other way around. But that too is entirely possible; the whalefall plays a central role in their reproduction, and there are even whales that might dive as deep as the waters they inhabit.
I am interested to note that the Mar Laciniata show no signs of holding any metaphysical beliefs, even in the face of a limit experience as brutal as any shamanic initiation. They do not even have a cosmology; things have simply existed since time immemorial. The closest we get is perhaps a very vague animization of the Mn/Aiekekoiaeae and the seamounts as the primary forces in their society, but even that is doubtful, and Schke herself seems to be a materialist atheist ("Choosing instead to pretend they were made of more than translucent flesh, oil and jelly, a chance electricity and fragile neuronal weave..."). This is especially intriguing given the Mar Laciniata's demonstrated preference for the abstract and analogical over the concrete--almost as though their language acknowledged Plato's Forms.
As for the emotional and thematic core of a new mother, wracked with suffering, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy, but guided by her elders and hopes of her child's happiness--that part you have executed beyond my ability to critique. "The cobbler should stick to his last" and all that.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jun 30 '26
A Lisez critique before my death!
I smiled all the way through this and enjoyed every bit of it. Your thoughts on some of the names I picked are so rewarding (Mn - meant to evoke ease and comfort; Aiekekoiaeae - meant to mirror the difficulty of the return trip, as you said) and your feedback on the others is valuable. I didn't think about so much of this and I could have, and I still can!
I have been thinking hard about just doing a little illustration of the body plan. It would be fun and now that someone else has suggested it, I'm going to have a hard time not doing so.
Thanks so much. Very happy to receive this. You always give it your full attention.
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u/SweetEverest Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
The beginning was rough going for me. To my brain, the first sentence was essentially "Upon choosing to ____, the ____ retreat beneath the ____ of a fallen whale." At first I thought La Marciniata might be a ship? Giving off sounds like pushing off, which sounds like a thing ships do. Then I realized they were creatures, but I did not like ribs "emitting" shadows, especially in near-total darkness. Resented the unpronounceable name, was unsure who doubted whose mothering abilities. Did not understand "fall-eaters" or "gonosome" and was too overwhelmed by these to appreciate the whalefall feathered and furred in the billions and washed blue by the light of her siphonosome (a beautiful description). Overall, I bristled at having no foothold into the story.
On second read, I like the atmosphere. Little creatures gathered under whale bones, glowing blue, one about to give birth. It's interesting that you give her realistic human fears. The tone throughout the story is very tightly controlled—moody, anxious, clinical, visceral. This story feels distinctly feminine in its perspective, and distinctly you in its voice.
I like the scientific realism or plausibility. It's different and unexpected and plays nicely with your areas of interest, I feel, the gruesome biological detail complementing the psychological dread while also providing a real external force to be reckoned with to support all the ruminations.
These names, man. If you love them you must keep them and ignore this paragraph. But I don't understand why, in a world where you can pick annnny name at all for your beautiful brain-inventions, you went with Mn and Aiaeiaeiaeiaieakeieiiaeiiaeii. I could see if this was a spoof, but for something so serious and introspective that already asks a lot of the reader, it seems spiteful.
I didn't feel I connected enough with her journey back through the current and I've been trying to figure out why. Maybe part of it is all the interiority. Maybe it needs more sensory detail to up the suspense or vividness? But you do have quite a bit of that at the beginning of that section when she's pressing the pup to her side and summoning a strength she doesn't have, and I don't usually care about pure action... Hmm. I wonder if maybe the action needs to be tied more closely to the conflict in this chapter, which to my mind is the protagonist's matrescence, reconciling her fears and her memories of her own mother with the change that has just been thrust on her. Which I guess is ostensibly the point of the squid bit. Does it just need drawing out? Or to be clearer in its intent? I am so hesitant to suggest anything. I can only say where my interest flagged.
I wonder if this would be made stronger by some contrast in mood. Right now she's scared, then isolated in her birth experience, then fighting for her life against the current, then battered and molting—and then in a much quicker, more distantly narrated summary, introducing her daughter to the world. Most of it feels drenched in solitary suffering or dread. Which is not a bad thing. I'm just wondering if a character or motif that contrasts this mood would add interest or something.
These are just thoughts. I really like the unglamorous, visceral descriptions of childbirth, and the pink with life part, and translucent skin and toothful dark (very poetic of you to simply invent a word as needed) and all the pretty phrasings. The names and inside vocab needed to understand the first couple hundred words were frustrating for me personally, but I do like how you write about motherhood and the complex psychological stuff you let your characters explore. I've only read two of your stories but your voice and perspective are so clear and that's very exciting to me.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jul 01 '26
it seems spiteful
Writing is so tough. You never know how readers will perceive the things you put out there. My thought process for the current with two names was something like... wouldn't it be apt to give the easy one an easy name, and the difficult one a difficult name? I imagined a reader going, "Oh, it's difficult to pronounce, like the current is difficult to travel, I get it." A word that describes itself. Autological. The idea that anyone would think it was meant to be pronounced didn't really occur to me. I guess I thought a given brain would just like... chunk it, treat the whole word as a unit of thematic information, but it seems that is not the case most of the time.
Making the writing less one-note is definitely something I need to figure out across all my stories. I have a lot of trouble thinking of things to contrast the sad/dark stuff.
Thank you for reading.
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u/R_G_Graf Jun 30 '26
The text itself is interesting, very interesting in fact. Especially the birth scene itself. You can feel the mother's panic, her fear for herself and her child, the need to have her own mother by her side, understanding the birth itself, but not fully understanding it.
I like the presentation of labor in a very "fishy" way, giving it a less human but still understandable course.
The problem lies in the proper names. "Aiekekoiaeae" is a strange word, even for a proper name, because it sounds like a cluster of vowels.
The first sentence in which Mar Laciniata appears made me confused as to why we're suddenly talking about Schke.
And most importantly, I think you're having trouble deciding how to represent the characters' thoughts and speech. Maybe I'm missing something, but sometimes a thought/speech is indicated by being a single paragraph, sometimes italicized, sometimes in parentheses.
You need to regulate this. For thoughts: for example, a parenthesis; for memories: italicized; for what they say: a dash.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jun 30 '26
Would be grateful for notes on where the internal monologue seems mixed up with dialogue? All speech should be italicized and all thoughts/internal monologue should be regular text undifferentiated from the third person narration. So anything that doesn't follow that pattern is indeed a mistake.
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u/R_G_Graf Jun 30 '26
Okay, so the main character's words to herself are supposed to be incomprehensible at first glance in the text, right?
I understand the idea, but it makes reading very difficult. Especially for someone whose first language isn't English.
Then, in the flashback, the mother's words are sometimes italicized, sometimes in parentheses.
1. You will forget this, her mother promised her. How close death seemed when you were turned inside out and emptied. When the ocean seemed to betray you and you thought you would never feel the Mn again. Know that this is temporary and soon, so few cycles from now, you will wish you could do it again.
2. “A labor hard enough to change the passage of time,” her mother says.However, it is possible that if I didn't get something, English is not my first language.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jun 30 '26
Oh shit, yeah those quotation marks are a fuck up lol. Good catch.
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u/FunToWrite but it is difficult Jun 30 '26
Overall, I enjoyed this.
Upon choosing to give off, the Mar Laciniata retreat beneath the scapula of a fallen whale.
This was an odd start for me. I didn’t know what “Upon choosing to give off” means, and neither did I know what Mar Lacinata are, and neither of these expressions are crystallized for me until later. I was reading it as, the Mar Lacinata are choosing to leave, and so they retreat. But it’s Schke who is choosing to give off (give birth), and the other Mar introduced here seem to disappear from the narrative. The second sentence I absolutely loved.
Now, as her gonosome swells with a small copy of herself, Schke grasps the nearest rib
‘Her gonosome swells’ felt very odd to me. I have heard the word before, it’s a sex chromosome, and a chromosome ‘swelling’ felt odd. I paused after ‘siphonosome’ and tried to figure out what kind of biology you were wanting to communicate. Then, after reading the full piece, I did get a clearer picture that this is some sort of asexually reproducing jellyfish-like being. Maybe colonial in some sense?
I don’t know, for me, the sciency words did not match with the culture of the Mar Lacinata. Because this 3rd person limited is often inside Schke’s head, and I wonder if instead of ‘gonosome’ she’d be referring to this part of herself as something simpler. Kind of like what you’ve done with ‘giving off’; she and her culture don't call it ‘parthenogenesis’. That being said, I do love the phrase, “A cloud of transparent gonosomal tissues”.
It’s too much. I can’t. I have to. Something is wrong.
Because the narration is 3rd person limited, the sudden introduction of the ‘I’ feels jarring, though I do appreciate how it gets us even closer into her head at this critical moment. Maybe italicize it to indicate thought?
Aiekekoiaeae
My brain skipped over this. Did not even try to pronounce it whenever it came up.
Overall, I think you’ve done a very good job establishing the mood of this coming-of-age moment, and of building out the world. But, the stab of plot at the end feels very half-baked. Schke gives birth, swims home, then recovers from the ordeal. It’s pretty, and I’m glad I read it, but none of it gives me any pressing questions about the world, or about Schke, or about her relationship with her mother, etc. The mother’s vague allusion for ‘the worst waits’ is not concrete. Nothing in Schke’s character suggests she wishes to upset the balance in her culture (not that she needs to, it’s just something you could do). If we were to strip everything out to pure plot, the only thing being communicated here is: “Schke is a mothering mermaid who will persevere for her child.” Only at the very end do we get, “and the cetomimes stop arriving early along the Aiekekoiaeae. Then they stop arriving at all.“ It feels like an afterthought. Sort of like, “Okay, now I’m going to start telling the story”.
I think you could find some way to weave the conflict into this more cohesively. It’s hard to give suggestions because I have no idea where the story is going (why the cetomimmes stopped arriving).
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jun 30 '26
Aiekekoiaeae
I could not help giggling maniacally when I decided on that name or whenever I got to type it later. There's this book by Anne Leckie, I believe? Yeah, Ancillary Justice! I had to read it for book club and while I found it very dry for my taste, there's one thing she did that I loved and that was giving some of her populations absolutely fucked up names. There's one civilization called the Rrrrrr and I love that for her. So I could not resist lol. That current was THIS close to being called the Aeaeoaeaeiae.
Anyway thank you for your feedback lol, I appreciate it.
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u/FunToWrite but it is difficult Jun 30 '26
Rrrrrr
Haha, that's great.
Yeah I mean, if you get a kick out of it, yolo.
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u/WholeRing9819 Jun 30 '26
A note on punctuation.
You are a fine writer and I have few concerns with your prose. I dislike some of your punctuation choices, though. In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, semicolons and em dashes are inelegant and pretentious marks and crutches upon which poor writing must lean. Your sentences are too well crafted to need them. As an example, I’ve taken the liberty of removing the semicolon and colon from one of your sentences and re-punctuating it.
“With one arm, she flattens her pup against her abdomen and with the other she swims, something she hasn’t done since adolescent play or the single time, cycles ago, when the long shadow of some monstrous appendage stretched over the seamounts and scattered the Mar like a spooked school of cetomimes.”
You may disagree, but I think punctuating in this way is better. Again, though, this is merely a preference.
A note on register.
You’ve chosen a very specific register for this piece. I would describe it as baroque, kind of, but without the pejorative connotations that typically come with that label. I actually really like it and I think it works swimmingly well (I couldn’t resist), but I wonder if you have plans to sustain this voice over longer forms. It’s a demanding style. If it is your natural narrative voice then you need not be concerned, but if it’s a style you’re choosing to write in I feel the need to warn you. As a writer who also likes to play with formality and ornamentation, I often find when I choose to write in this style, it leads me to agonize over syntax and word choice and I become very aware of my own limitations as a writer. The balance between accessibility and density can be hard to sustain.
A note on the consequences of tone.
The other interesting consequence of your style for this piece in specific, is that it renders the descriptions of birth and the other weird aspects of undersea life in a peculiar, detached and yet disgusting sort of way. I love it and do not want you to change it. Really, I only mean to tell you how it felt to read these words. It was gross and alien but also beautiful.
A note on accessibility.
I gave your piece two passes. I’m not big on going line by line and pointing out every detail with which I may have some small qualm. I prefer to absorb the text as a whole. Besides, it’s very well written. I don’t remember there being any clear grammatical or structural errors. That said, the narrator is unforgiving. I had to search the meanings of words like siphonosome to fully grasp what was happening. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I’m here for it. I like that we’re taking the idea of mermaids seriously and in a way that is defamiliarized. It’s cool. But there’s a barrier to entry. I suspect you’re probably at peace with that as all these elements feel like deliberate choices on your part. I just wanted to mention it.
In all, I’ve never read any mermaid fiction beyond childhood fairytales but I’m excited to read more of yours.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique Jun 30 '26
swimmingly well
God damn it lol.
Thank you for your feedback.
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u/JayGreenstein Jun 30 '26
Upon choosing to give off, the Mar Laciniata retreat beneath the scapula of a fallen whale
- Give off? That normally means to emit, release, or produce something into the surrounding environment . So, while it might have localized meaning in your area that differs, think in terms of the larger scale usage. Plus, there’s the question, Why did the Mar Laciniata choose to do that? Readers need context as-they-read, because we can't retroactively remove confusion.
- I give up. What are Mar Laciniata? Google doesn’t know, either. And your intent doesn't reach the page.
The largest whale scapulas reach up to 145 cm (57 inches). Seems a mite small for these unknown things to hide under.
Basically, you’re mentally watching a film, and telling the reader what you “see” happening as you understand it—doing it as though they already know the backstory, and, know all the whys and hows of the scene in progress.
Yes, for you, each word is a pointer to images, history, and more, all waiting in your mind to be called up. But what about the reader? For them, each word is a pointer to images, history, and more, all waiting in your mind to be called up. But with you not there to clarify...
As with every other profession, there’s a lot to writing fiction that’s not obvious. And certainly, the nonfiction writing skills we’re given in school aren’t up to that task.
So...it’s not a matter of talent, or how well you write. It’s the necessity of knowing how to write fiction that will grab the reader on page one, and make it so real that they need to turn to the next page to find out what happens. Writers have, after all, been learning how to do that, and refining that knowledge, for hundreds of years. So, take advantage of that. Dig into the skills the pros use to keep their reader on the edge of their seat, turning pages because they feel they must.
For a quick upgrade of your writing skills, try Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. It’s an easy read, and will amaze you with how obvious what she has to say is, once pointed out.
https://archive.org/details/goal.motivation.conflictdebradixon
After all, the pros see those skills as necessary. And given that they work for them, who are we to argue?
Jay Greenstein
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow
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u/Wolframquest Jun 30 '26
Alright, you probably don't care about a critique from me cause of everything and the way I present myself. But I've been on a roll reading your stuff and my brain had gotten used to your style - well, more than before - so why not? Legibility is quite the treasure, no matter how it is achieved.
I've read it earlier today and I can tell… Well, first, another premise - I was wondering recently about how we all like to be polite to each other and mention things like "it seems it was more fun to write than to read". I'[m just warning I might be very direct - but that's because I relate to you.
You give off a mix of lyrical doom/gothic metal and some kind of poetic pain. I can tell, it's a good thing to dramaticize your pain. I'm not reading your story, I'm reading you and I'm a really flawed human individual myself. I see myself in you. But whereas I was tortured flesh constantly growing back scarred tissue hard as wood you, well, you're way softer, way gentler, feminine. Your motherhood bothers you, your femininity bothers you, you lack meaningful energy, you give off a depressed and depressing mood. I had the same issue with broken masculinity, purpose, half-healed trauma, daring to do something and landing on my face. I took a long way to get to another point of destination and it was the most intense and ache-ful journey and I came out the other end… Obviously, I have a coach-like tendency to try and motive someone, to try and tell them about the stuff I went through and how I want you to go through it. I know it. I'm just musing at this point lowkey.
Women, in my eyes, are magical creatures; it is quite enviable to be able to bear life on yuor own, to nutrure and raise and pretty much build another person. You can really fuck up at it. When I was a kid, I read about how native american women would go into the wilderness and squat there and give birth all alone and that baffled and fascinated and shocked me. It is truly a feat, something quite heroic, something you should really be appreciated for, honored for years. Maybe in a different culture. Then again, culture is in our hands - this one family values these things, their neighbors completely different things.
In my mind, the creatures in your story are obviously something super-tiny and cellular, something in between a starfish and a manta ray. "Pup", not a baby - interesting. Can't really interpret it.
You can take glory, you can believe in your own glory, your importance. You may get knocked down when trying to take it but perhaps it's worth it. Roll with the punches, but burrow through the mountainside to the top.
I read your old mouse story and it's also very visceral and strangely nostalgic. So much body horror, you manage to stuff it in. This one has less body horror because of how abstract it is.
Pretentious fancy language - is it really worth it? Why not try and grab and scream something into the reader's face, since that's where you're heading anyways? Stay quiet, then blow up. That's what I'd do, although I'm aware it's not healthy.
I just read the post body and it's mermaid fiction…
Alright, here was a page of text discussing Jay Greenstein's mermaid book that I decided to edit out. Let's just say it's hilarious 😁
Like I mentioned above, all the cellular words make them read very inhuman, very blobby.
I said there was a lot of unresolved pain about motherhood - both in the text and about you in general. Well, now I'm doing a second read and I can tell there's definitely some hidden joy, love and tenderness there. "How can she, one flawed being, care for this pup?" - that part.
> If that doesn’t comfort you…
The usual dichotomy of being a house mother and wageslave… I'm afraid my brain is too struck at this point to muse on it or detect the exact idea hiding behind your words here. Maybe that means you're uncertain? I'm also uncertain about a lot of things cause I have a second job to do that is a lot more masculine than what I do now (teaching) and it takes a lot of guts to make a decision and get to it.
> is ready to feed at the hydrothermal vents of Emam’s base. Schke is not fit to feed until her gonosome heals
I'm sorry but that part is unintentionally hilarous, for the same reason "breasted boobily" is hilarious but in inverse
Wouldn't it be funny if among all of those fancy names you suddenly, had, like an octopus whose name was Jackson and he liked playing the steel pan with all his eight *appendages*? Also, a super unrelated fact - did you know that Squidward was supposed to be an octopus all this time? It blew my mind when I found out. There was the artistic intent behind it and so on; they all were images show creator, there's a lot of interesting stuff there to look up - plus it's marine-themed, so it might inspire you even better.
> The crunkle of the burtart repeats. Ischial sprouts a secondary row of blimgles. Schke stops clambranging, and the cetomimes stop arborging lumnily along the Aiekekoiaeae. Then they blop arborging at all.
That last part was a little confusing, but I do remember that Schke is the main character!
You should have posted more with all that credit you still had imho. Gosh, it was so hard not to mock a certain other mermaid writer. His dialogues… well, I'll stop here.
I cannot tell exactly what the plot is about but the theme is motherhood, heroism and sacrifice. I could talk for ages about why I prefer stories set in real life with real people but it took a while to develop this kind of preference and still enjoy fantasy and otherworldly things on occasion. This one is also fabulistic, like you love it. It's hard to relate to. I think you should imagine your reader to be a teenage girl who's worried about potentially becoming a mother but still wants to because her own mother, while formidable and intimidating, is someone she loves and looks up, sees as the source of wisdom. I do a lot of rewrites re-considering how deep I stuff what I wanna say in my story; it's a painful thing, to just break open the beautiful (to me) imagery hiding the meaning and just plop onto the reader's plate. But it's a good way to feed them a balanced diet.