[FS]

Nitpick away. I found most of this very insightful, even though I felt my face flush here and there as I read it.

Originally Posted by hawaiian mage

I'm not personally sure if I would want to read an entire book with this premisis. Like, the writting isn't bad at all but the it was sort of wearing on my by the end. (that might have just been the scenery though, actually... trying to concentrate while in a bright sunny place isn't my forte. If that's the case it might be fine for someone else.)

I've only added scraps to the story since I posted this part, but the 'beautiful day' scenery was mostly there to establish the completely different place Ben found himself in. From here on they're on the move, and end up in much different conditions.

Reading the sentance that had these words almost turned me off from reading the rest. It just seems entirely obvious they were made up, and from where I stand it didn't seem like much thought went into them. I mean, slugfunnel? Holy christ. You might as well just say "You skitleeboo!" or "What the poom!?" Make the curses more believable, or just use normal ones. Don't be afriad to use both made up and normal ones either, that might be an interesting effect.

Believe me, that's one bit of the story that I've re-written dozens of times. Problem is that most of the time when I use regular swearing or namecalling in a story, it ends up feeling way too forced. Not that this doesn't, when I think about it. So yeah, I think I'll eventually change that into something less stand-outish.

The use of the word "wiseguy" to describe him was way to much of a short cut, and it makes the character seem more fabricated to label him like that. Say he sounded sarcastic or witty, but don't say "wiseguy."

Agreed, needs more subtlety. It's bad form to try and tell they're supposed to think of the characters.

Who's knee deep in the grass? The animals or ben? I couldn't really tell. And after that I suddenly had the nagging thought of "How big are these animals?" I assumed they were the size of their flip-side equivilents, but at times I couldn't tell. Maybe make that clear somehow.

I guess that's a mistake in sentence structure. The grass isn't unusually high - it's the animals that are standing knee-deep in it.

Admittedly, saying ET looked like a space penis was funny, but it's just a random culture reference put in for almost no reason. Maybe that's the way Ben pictures it, but the description still relies upon the assumption the reader knows who ET is. I would cut out this sentance with someing more general about just aliens. (Or, alternativly, use this type of reference more often, creating a more targetted audience and making it apparent that this is just the way Ben thinks.)

In retrospect, it's an out of place joke. I might swap that with "bald space monkey" or something later. Still, I think ET's a fairly contemporary cultural icon, and that one could probably get away with including him, though more helpful context might be useful.

The dialogue around here seems somewhat contrived. Like another writing short cut. Jynx somehow knows we have stories about people going to other worlds. Everywhere else in the story he doesn't know shit about Ben or his world. Asking about stories was just to effective a strategy to be used by a believable character. Also, the way Ben responds is counterintuitive to the momentum he's built of disbelief. The exchange of ideas happens too fast and effectivly here, and threw off my reading a bit.

Actually, the idea here was that Jynx means to ask, almost rhetorically, that Ben's "people" have stories in their world just like they do in Jynx's. He's assuming they do, because they're rather common things. I'm not sure what I was going for with Ben's response, but I think I neglected a line here explaining that he's just kind of shocked to a point where his mind's working and replying on auto pilot. I'll put some more thought into that later.

I had a question though. Did you come up with the idea of magic being normal and technology being a lost art yourself, or was that part of the "inspired by" you mentioned at the beggining? I ask becuase I came up with the same idea and was sort of working out a videogame RPG premises that had that same ironic twist. I thought I was being innovative and completely original with that one... once again however, I realize that originality died out around the 18th century and since then it's all remakes.

The idea came from a PC adventure game called the Longest Journey, in which a woman living in a slightly sci-fi future time discovers that there's kind of a 'twin' world to Earth, where instead of technology there's magic, and mythical creatures. On the magical world, called Arcadia, they're aware of the existence of the other side (called "Stark" by them), but the opposite isn't true. Both worlds exist in a balance that's disrupted, and the woman has to travel back and forth between both sides to fix the balance.

You can see there's strong resemblances between that idea and mine, but I felt the concept of opposites wasn't explored much in the game. The characters in Arcadia, for the most part, weren't very interested in technology, and in the end it turned more into a Zelda-like "get the element from each race" mission.

In my version, both 'sides' kind of mirror each other, in that our more exotic sci-fi is their fairytale, and both sides are mostly wrong in their storytelling.

I hate when I feel I come up with something brand new and then find out someone already thought of it, or someone does in time (ie, some time before Warcraft 3 showed up, I thought what a cool name "Night Elves" was), but yeah, no sense in getting bothered about it.