• Member Since 29th Nov, 2013
  • offline last seen Sep 1st, 2019

Tired Old Man


Celestia's exhausted personal paperweight.

T

Berry Punch has stayed sober for thirty days, battling a demon of temptation all the while.

She has had enough. Tonight, she strives to get rid of the demon once and for all.

But can she succeed, or will she fall and slip into alcoholism once more?

~~~

I extend my thanks to Vrilix, ambion, and RedDragon for their incredible assistance.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 9 )

Hm. Very nicely done, if I may say so.

Hello, I am your WRITE reviewer, and I’ll be here to mosey about this little story of yours called Demon in the Glass.

At a modest one thousand, six hundred thirty two words, there’s no wondering just how short this story is. ‘Very’, to put it simply.

Now just like anything else, short stories have pitfalls all there own, typically in the general range of trying to get everything in that needs to be in, establishing it very quickly and very thoroughly.

You had mixed results, I feel.

I’d like to divide the story into three arcs; beginning, middle and end. Intentional or not, these three areas are given distinct styles in the writing.

The beginning here is very expositional. It’s the place in the story where we find the most and chunkiest paragraphs, and it makes sense that this is where we find them as, like I said before, your beginning is aiming to lay down a foundation as quickly as possible.

The scene itself is very much relying on imagery to carry its presence, and with the ideas of ‘dimly-lit’ home, candelabras and red candles and the several times reinforced image of dark red wine the most strongly evoked image is what I could almost call vampiric. The use of present tense is an interesting choice, and while I’m not sure it was flawlessly used - some sentences come across as quite passive in their tone because of it - I do say that the choice of tense does lend something of a ritualistic feel to the proceedings: each thing happens following another, each at the forefront of the now, this moment, so that it does add an uncertainty to the reader on just how things may develop from here.

There is a small but noticeable variance in style in the beginning. Certain sentences are given a very formal, detached and observational air, while others are given a more flowery and prose-like approach, making for a slight but nagging dissonance I had with the narration.

Again, I’m not sure how much of this was intentional or not, but I think your intent here was to show (always a keyword in writing, that) how much more aware Berry is of the wine than say, the corkscrew.

And that’s a good technique to use, though it perhaps you weren’t as decisive about when to be stoic and when to be poetic with the words. For instance, this moment:

Holding the bottle with one hoof, she pulls up on the corkscrew with the other, and after two seconds a pop echoes through the room as the vacuum seal is broken, and the wine tastes the liberating air. She discards the corkscrew; she doesn’t need it anymore.

That manages to start in the former, briefly swing far into the latter (going so far as to personify the wine as a something freed) then swinging right back around to one of the most poignantly applied sentences of the story.

So in a nutshell - there’s good formal, observational detachment and good poetic investment equally, but you’ve been a bit blend-happy with them, rather than more carefully picking which should go where, and when, about what, and for how long.

The middle stage begins with the dialogue. Here again there’s another major shift in the stylings - from narrative to dialogue. The middle arc is entirely dialogue, and I can see why you did that. With the scene established, with the tone apparent and the image fixed in our minds, it’s ripe time to set things moving.

Again though, I wonder if your decision here wasn’t perhaps a bit out of touch with the rest of the story. The dialogue itself is...perhaps a touch lacklustre?

Don’t get me wrong, it does well to move the plot along, but in reading and rereading it I felt there was something missing, from both characters. It’s established that there’s a history of encounters between them (a month and more), but there’s a lack of familiarity (however distressing that familiarity may be) on Berry’s part, and Demon is...undefined in his motives.

Or, no, his motive is the only thing that is defined. Now considering the quasi-demonic / hallucinatory / allegorical battle in the mind of the self nature of the situation, I’m not asking for, say, physical qualities or a sensible backstory. But his character lacks personality beyond a “get Berry to drink by any means necessary” insistence, and even at that he fails to really land some oomph-tastic physiological beatdowns.

Or, more specifically, It was Berry’s job storywise to supply and react to the various incentive / fodder / arguments of his to really enable him to be a foil and she never really lets it take off.
She starts off strong, defiant, and stoic with solid, short and unbroken sentences, then without much depiction of breaking down in her defenses becomes a much weaker, much more indecisive and suggestible figure. Again, I’m noting it as a sort of wobbling inconsistency in the writing, just as I saw in the beginning.

"I have forced nothing, Berry. I never have. No, it is YOU who have forced me into existence, and you do so every night with this silly ritual of yours.”

This right here is touching upon a rather hugely important theme and one that I could make an article about in its own right, but it wasn’t really a front and centre focus of the story, so I’ll come back to this.

The end stage happens in some undefined moment between Berry’s strong beginning and her sudden weakening, when she becomes pliable to bargaining. We see a return of narrative, which does a nice touch in reestablishing expression, action, various tics and the like.

The end suffers from some weird inconsistency in tenses. Everything attributive (‘she said’, ‘he smirked’ - this sort of thing) is done in past tense. The paragraphs interspaced by “just...one...sip....” zig-zag between past and present, and there’s really not a whole lot of grammatical reason to accept that it does this, returning to finish the story on a present tense moment with Berry and her decision.

Having gone through all that, I’d like to start distilling down for the key notion I’m getting here.

Inconsistency - The bugbear of this story is inconsistency, which especially in a story as short as this is paramount for creating a story that has a feel of a single, unified expression. Our beginning hot-foots it between seriously formal to expressively poetic, our characters are vague and, in Berry’s case, quick to fall without really providing the emotional awareness and insight we needed to justify it from readers’ perspective, and the ending is tense about tenses.

Nothing you’ve done here was unskilled or plain ol’ bad when taken on its own, but all these distinct things were mixed as they were without some kind of underlying pattern for cohesion it made for a slightly disconcerting read.

Another thing I’d call out is not so much a fault of something present as it is a fault of something absent. With overarching tones of a Faustian deal at work here and Demon shown to have a visual presence of some description, it was a bit disappointing that we didn’t see more out of him. Body language is a powerful reinforcement for highlighting a confrontation such as this, and the fact that you instead relied more exclusively on dialogue alone to carry the story drained some of the vitality from it.

Similiarily, the imagery and allusion surrounding the wine itself makes a token appearance or two, but wasn’t really utilized in the way it could have been to reinforce and highlight Berry’s situation and viewpoint.

The ending itself is very, very open. My personal take on it would be that Demon upholds his word to the literal letter. He goes, never to be seen nor heard again, because he isn’t needed anymore. That sip turned to a sup turned to a top up turned to an empty bottle, and Berry knows exactly what she did and how hard she fell, and so Demon isn’t needed to torment her anymore because now she’s fledged in her capacity to do it for herself.

But that’s just my take, and not really review-proper.

There was one other thing I wanted to discuss in a semi-review capacity while I’m at it, which I believe was that quote I included earlier. Simply put, Berry is the one empowering her own Demon, because she’s turned overcoming her addiction into such a huge ritual so rife with temptation that she’s more or less walked to the absolute edge of the cliff to prove she won’t jump, in some kind of insane logic. Demon alludes to this once or twice, but again never really drives the point home.

Anyway, that’s more or less everything I had in mind for this review, but do feel absolutely free to ask on any points I may not have been clear enough with, or to discuss something I might have missed or that you disagree with.

Ah yes, I nearly forgot - it seems you had some concern about Demon being a noun/proper noun. It's not particularily jarring that sometihng we expect to be a description is in fact a name, though some readers might not pick up on it as quickly. Mostly though, it's the fact that it is not addressed in the story that leaves this chance for confusion and not-feeling-quite-rightness readers might have. 'Demon', I'm assuming, is the nomenclature Berry has given this thing; rich with connotations of torment, evil, trickery and all that jazz, so it should have been apparant just what she felt about this thing. Except that it's never really given a moment to be delivered by her personally, instead being a treated as a minor point that the narrative sidles sneakily into the story without much. It's that lack of being addressed directly that leaves the ambiguity in.

Anyway, to recap - review review review, words, things, stuff; happy to further discuss any point you may feel like.

4155625

I extend my thanks to Vrilix, ambion, and RedDragon for their incredible assistance.

Hello, I am your WRITE reviewer

4155625

If the review you're looking at seems contrary to the present story, that is because Demon in the Glass has just undergone a significant rewrite, meaning the original review is now obsolete.

That should cure ye of any confusion

"Aww cool, Berry's off the wagon again! Hey guys, come check out what she's doing with that glass now!" :rainbowlaugh:

Uh oh, Berry what have you done.

This being a Magical Land, after all, it's quite possible that the Demon was something other than Berry's imagination.

As should be obvious from Collateral Damage, I think that alcoholism runs in that family. It just skipped Cheerilee, partially for genetic and partially psychological reasons Put simply, Cheerilee's more of an optimsitic extrovert, and hence is less likely to have prolonged bouts of depression. Such depression tempts the sufferer to self-medicate.

The demon always wins.

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