Something Like a Storm Petrel / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Something Like a Storm Petrel.

Stygian Blue 27 Nov 2023 19:37

MASSIVE THANKS TO DESTINYSDAY, SPODDET, AND ROSIE FOR THE CRIT. THIS WORK NEEDED MUCH AND YOU GAVE IT WHAT IT DESERVED TO ENCOURAGE IT TO THRIVE. I AM SO PROUD/ASHAMED/EMBARRASSED/THINK IT'S WILDLY FUNNY THAT THIS WAS A JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE FANFICTION IN THE FIRST FOUR PARAGRAPHS AND THEN JUST STOPPED BEING THAT AFTER I REALIZED I 1) HAVEN'T WRITTEN IN THIRD PERSON SINCE FIFTH GRADE AND 2) KEPT MIXING UP THIS AND A MAGES OF RELA DRAFT IN THE OTHER TAB WHICH I WAS WORKING ON SIMULTANEOUSLY UNTIL I DECIDED TO MASH THEM TOGETHER LIKE BLUE AND YELLOW PLAYDOUGH TO MAKE GREEN. THIS TOOK A WEEK TO WRITE AND I AM THRILLED WITH THE RESULT. I WILL SOON GET TO MAKE A MAGES OF RELA HUB AND Y'ALL GET TO EXPERIENCE THE CONSEQUENCES.

-STYG

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Last edited on 27 Nov 2023 22:10 by Stygian Blue Show more

Pilot Light

meltedbee 27 Nov 2023 19:41

This piece is something I hope to find whenever I read something new. It is a story that affects one in nebulous and unforseen ways, but it is clear that it has affected one nonetheless. One of the most beautiful pieces I have read in a long, long time.

Keep up the good work, Styg :)

lzhoudidion 28 Nov 2023 03:46

Tasty—the best I can describe it is like mala flavor, where there's an slow burn yet an exhilarating rush as it nears the end. Plenty of details and little pockets of richness to savor. Well done.

FleshMaddAvalon 28 Nov 2023 13:51

Soup. It simmers. The flavors coalesce and break apart
A live recipe told in pieces
Collections of flowing meat
Silvering vegetables
Scrumptious seasonings

You are a chef
Flexile, willing, determined
You serve me with a fire in your eyes
Staring me down as the dish meets the table
This meal is a test

Gentle ladle, hesitant blow, pursed lipped sip
My mouth exploded
Flavorful
Intense
Emotions
A rampart of my mind dissolves

Wouldn't it be nice
To drift
In the deep
Welcoming
Eternal
Stygian Blue?

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I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust

Snapdragon133 29 Nov 2023 19:39

A fascinating start to something that I expect will become truly great. Probably inaccurate to describe it as a start, since I'd guess this is directly connected to Door To Stranger Stars (I'll have to read that again to get caught up on the whole lore) but it does still feel like we've circled around to the beginning of things. The concept of storing your memories in another living being, being forced to confront those memories with no other memories to contextualize, forgetting your development as soon as you escape the body, it's all very wonderful and really well executed. I didn't really understand the memory with Jasmine, but other than that everything else had a pretty easy to medium difficulty to parse. I also wanted to share my appreciation for a couple of standout lines:

and treat it as one does an apple tree too old to bear fruit.

Like people was more than a term for many individuals grouped.

Mwah love these, and so many more scattered like sea turtles scrambling to the ocean all over this story. Well done, can't wait for the hub!

Last edited on 30 Nov 2023 01:28 by Snapdragon133 Show more

Soaring to new heights

destinysday 30 Nov 2023 01:15

Haha, totally didn't have this tab open on my computer without realizing i never actually hit the post button

While a tad late, I want to reiterate the things I've said while reviewing the piece. This is a wonderfully written piece from top to bottom. You do a great job building intrigue for the reader, weaving hints of this magical world, characters, and backstories that leaves one wanting to claw their way deeper to learn more. And I sincerely hope you continue to flesh out this gem you've provided.

Great job, Styg. It was my pleasure to watch you grow this piece to what it is today. +1

zipzipskins 05 Dec 2023 21:04

I have now read a few of your pieces and a thought has struck me, repeatedly, like the blows of a prizefighter—that every line you write, every paragraph committed to the page, contains these little puzzles and morsels that ask, nay, demand that I turn them over, and over, and over again in my mind. The bits and protrusions which at first seemed ungainly, after minutes on such a mental lathe, become smooth, polished, necessary, vital to the way the work hangs together as a whole. It is uncommon, period, to discover a writer that is so bold and experimental with prose as to perplex and yet hold so tightly the interest of the reader; even more so on a website of amateur authors, hobby-writers, and devotees of the craft of writing for its own sake, and not for so much as a single cent. And yet, this community has its perfect place for you, and you astound.

In the coming days and weeks, I will be thinking about this piece, craving more, and I will be thinking about the little puzzleboxes you have written within it, craving more, and I will be thinking about how you have many other works, all twisting and undulating in this beautiful, ferocious fashion, worming their respective ways into my brain, craving more.

Challenged and inspired to push further, to go beyond.

Thank you. +1

Here's a Little Ditty: Fjord-Bound Wolves in a Timestream Unperturbed

Stygian Blue 06 Dec 2023 00:02

This brings me such delight and inspiration — I am a sea of brambles rippling in with the tide, ever coaxing new pebbles onto the beach for people to enjoy, and am so glad. I read recently an essay describing how much of fiction is stuck in "Twilight-level" writing, from dialogue to emotional punches to the way characters are described (clothing, pretty faces, and so on). I am thrilled to leap from the cliff of uncertainty and let the gulls' cries as they dive from my way, the trinkets that fall from my pockets on the way down (and I never crash, by the way, only reverse my gravity and leap again from the bottom of the world to the top in an endless cascade of freefall flight — can you see why the Gravis interpretation of magic was the first to be mine?) collect in the sky, thready screams and organic seagull cat-wails and all the silver bells I keep on me (which I do, by the way — there is one with me right now, and I ring it thrice before I sleep to dream the best of dreams, for I am no nightmare-catcher but instead a nightmare-chaser, a lonely wolf in the black forest who pelts down a deer-path and catches them quivering and squirming and bites down hard with notches in my teeth like the crook in the beak of a peregrine falcon to snap the neck so clean, letting the nightmare-juices run down into the soil for new black mondo grass to grow among the roots of the pines — alas, it has been too long. Had I made this prose proper, story-like and meant to be understood the first time around, I would go back and attach a thread — but here, we are where I can stop pretending to fall helplessly: snap the rope caught behind my back and I can transform into a sea eagle or a red kite or an osprey, catch the wind beneath my wings and plummet sideways into a red-yellow-blue-purple emerald sunrise over the fjords and sea, beautiful like the world-camera cannot see.

I scarcely catch what I have written, here, but know this: I am immensely pleased with your observations and cherish them dearly. You give an old-new writer — it's only been just over two years since I started here, did you know? — a sense of fondness curling in my heart like a cobra bit down and burrowed in while I was away chasing dreams, and is now writhing from the patter of the beat in my chest turning to a drumbeat. Thank you, thank you. You are splendid.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Last edited on 06 Dec 2023 00:03 by Stygian Blue Show more

Hot damn.

Spoddetman 06 Dec 2023 00:17

That was a ride and a half, and I cherished every moment of it. The prose flows like mercury, splitting serpentine around my head to defy my understanding. I can almost taste the salty crackle of the synapses imprinted onto words, transferred to my mind like the malleable memories of our dear protagonist. This piece has come so far since I first looked at that Google Doc, and it continues to make it my honor to have looked at it before publication. Perhaps I will come back to this in my dreams. Either way, I will not forget it.

Caramel-filigree +1.

NotAnOligarch 06 Dec 2023 20:14

You deserve to be paid for your work, my rolling blue friend. Your prose is smooth like milk and tastes like breakfast. Oats and berries, a crepe, tea. What a unique and complete dining experience offered up for no cost. I hope you are somehow getting money from writing, mostly because it would be a crying shame if the wider world did not get to experience whoever Stygian Blue is sometime. This is both similar and different from your typical (excellent) style, as can be said for every one of your works when examined with a fine comb — any-which-way, it is wonderful. With much admiration and many reignited dreams for the sea, a meager +1 for you.

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Fires rage just below the surface of the ice.

Stygian Blue 11 Dec 2023 20:38

My thanks! I send the compliments to the chef. Housekeeping first: I do not write for money — this is an exclusive buffet for you and yours of the Library. Perhaps one day I will write for a wider audience, but personally I like what we have here. I believe writing for money would change my style and motivations for writing — perhaps to something better, perhaps not — and besides that, it would become writing for others rather than writing for myself. Maybe I will one day, but I want to keep my writing largely if not only to the Library if I can. A deliciously sweet lollypop of hobby and cheer, unmelted into the other candies of my life. If I were to write for larger, it would be with much discussion with the site-people, because it might-would be with the aim of bringing more love to the WL.

Indeed, this is different from my usual psychedelic tea — I have my grains of ricin and LSD lined up in a neat single file for the straw, rather than knocking it back in one massive bolus beneath the skin. I believe it comes from how people's interactions with one another are more difficult to parse through a kaleidoscope the more people are in the scene, and making it through my usual style would be a passionate diatribe tangled on itself thrice-ten over like matted feathers after diving from the Niagara Falls with the spray rubbing the barbules inside-out backwards and behind. Nevertheless, I am immensely pleased with it, and am glad that you enjoyed.

Cheers, and bon appetit! To joy in work and play,

Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?

Last edited on 11 Dec 2023 20:39 by Stygian Blue Show more