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Good Stuff: I like the idea here of an imaginary friend (with a cool design!) wearing out its welcome in a big world, and how the poor thing is just too juvenile to understand adult problems. The resentment between the characters is well-conveyed, and the opening introduced some uncertainty that made the slow reveal of the problems stand out. Well done!
Bad Stuff: A minor annoyance is that this thing has technical writing problems which distracted once too often. There are comma splices, oddly phrased segments, and in one case early on a bit of dialogue buried in a paragraph when it should have had its own. And the imaginary friend being real aspect: I'm not sure if it's clever or if it would have been cleverer to have Sparky be completely imaginary. I also never fully got a sense of what Jordan's problem was. I guess he thinks they're being held back by Sparky, but nothing's explicitly said about why, so it just sort of hangs there without full context.
Verdict: Solid Entry. Tending to Mid Tier for me. In this case not because it has problems, but because I'm still not entirely sure how effective it is as a commentary on growing up, which it seems to me to be, and even then that feels like a bland and vague guess. I do like those parts I did understand, though, and with some more spit and polish and a little more clarity on what the main issue is, I'd gladly make it an unambiguous Solid Entry.
And there we go! Every fic reviewed by me. Good luck everyone, and I look forward to seeing more comments on what other people think. Toodle-oo!
Bad Stuff: A minor annoyance is that this thing has technical writing problems which distracted once too often. There are comma splices, oddly phrased segments, and in one case early on a bit of dialogue buried in a paragraph when it should have had its own. And the imaginary friend being real aspect: I'm not sure if it's clever or if it would have been cleverer to have Sparky be completely imaginary. I also never fully got a sense of what Jordan's problem was. I guess he thinks they're being held back by Sparky, but nothing's explicitly said about why, so it just sort of hangs there without full context.
Verdict: Solid Entry. Tending to Mid Tier for me. In this case not because it has problems, but because I'm still not entirely sure how effective it is as a commentary on growing up, which it seems to me to be, and even then that feels like a bland and vague guess. I do like those parts I did understand, though, and with some more spit and polish and a little more clarity on what the main issue is, I'd gladly make it an unambiguous Solid Entry.
And there we go! Every fic reviewed by me. Good luck everyone, and I look forward to seeing more comments on what other people think. Toodle-oo!
Very nice:
But the characters strike me as maybe a little too old to be having this conversation--we're told that Sparky's last modification was when Jordan was ten and that that was thirteen years ago. I'd suggest, author, making the guys seventeen or eighteen instead, just on the cusp of legality. I also wondered if our unnamed narrator ever saw Jordan again or if this was the end of their friendship as well as the end of their imaginary friend.
You could increase the poignancy, too, by revealing at the end that our narrator, now 23, is standing beside Jordan's freshly dug grave--or even better, by showing our narrator reading about Jordan divorcing his third wife on the same day that he sells his start-up to Google for forty-four million dollars. Something to show that this is the moment that their paths diverged and never came back together again...
Mike
But the characters strike me as maybe a little too old to be having this conversation--we're told that Sparky's last modification was when Jordan was ten and that that was thirteen years ago. I'd suggest, author, making the guys seventeen or eighteen instead, just on the cusp of legality. I also wondered if our unnamed narrator ever saw Jordan again or if this was the end of their friendship as well as the end of their imaginary friend.
You could increase the poignancy, too, by revealing at the end that our narrator, now 23, is standing beside Jordan's freshly dug grave--or even better, by showing our narrator reading about Jordan divorcing his third wife on the same day that he sells his start-up to Google for forty-four million dollars. Something to show that this is the moment that their paths diverged and never came back together again...
Mike