Estee Suffers Through: Reckless, Chapters 1 and 2. · 6:22pm Jul 16th, 2019
Yes, I could have just gone with 'Estee Reads'.
Like I don't know what y'all came here for.
So. Welcome to RB's Revenge. We all know what RB went through. So the question becomes: what is this book, that he feels it was the appropriate response to that?
Let's start with the basics. It was written by Cornelia Funke, who's arguably best-known for this. That would seem to indicate an author of some quality, right? Admittedly, the ability to get a bestseller or six doesn't always correspond with the capacity for writing: see (insert your antifavorite here) for details. But at the very least, she has what it takes to Catch On With The Masses, and that's more than I can say for a lot of people.
It's three hundred and ninety-four pages. Why did I type that out? Because I'll have to type everything out. Unlike RB, I have a physical copy. (Library remaindered. At least Twilight would be happy.) This means quoting the book requires a little more than pure cut-and-paste. As such, the excerpts will probably be kept to a comparable minimum.
However, I do think we should start by quoting the blurb on the inner dust jacket fold, because that's all the book is using to sell itself to you: the back cover is review quotes. (Not necessarily quotes for this book, mind: just quotes associated with this author.) And here's the sum total of the marketing.
Beyond the mirror, the darkest fairy tales come alive....
(Yes, four dots.)
(This doesn't feel like an encouraging start.)
For years, Jacob Reckless has enjoyed the Mirrorworld's secrets and treasures.
Not anymore.
His younger brother has followed him.
And given the entire Mirrorworld sibling cooties.
Now dark magic
As opposed to, you know, any other way of describing it.
will turn the boy to beast,
the film to animation, the animation to live-action remake, the remake to Twitter outrage
break the heart of the girl he loves,
and don't even ask what it did to the girl he was fairly indifferent about
and destroy everything Jacob holds most dear....
...is this going to be a trend?
The book was printed in Canada. Canada can count to three, right?
Anyway, I just solved the whole problem. Let's make Jacob a teenager. And give him a unique surname, something like -- 'Reckless'. Something which makes it clear that he's part of a culture which can't be bothered to hold anything as 'most dear' because, like, actually caring about stuff is so 2000s. And so nothing will be hurt, because nothing is all he cares about.
Odysseus ain't got nothin' on me.
Look, his name is Jacob Reckless. A certain personality type has been implied.
(If you're curious, it is a real surname. There's about 120 Reckless in the United States and oddly, they all work for the government.)
Unless he can find a way to stop it.
In three hundred and ninety-four pages or less!
If you're looking for happily ever after, you've come to the wrong place.
Ahem.
Me.
'Happily ever after.'
Does not compute.
That's what you've got for me, Funke? Don't expect a happy ending? I'm the world's last Wraith player. I treat Lemony Snicket's work as a comedy of optimism. I read FIMFic's New column. For fun. Happy and I have not been on speaking terms for the last -- when was my birthday? No, the original. Yeah. -- that long!
I don't do happy.
Bring it.
Before we go on: the book was also illustrated by Ms. Funke. Speaking as someone for whom Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain not only failed, but set itself on fire, I will usually not be in a proper position to judge her results, especially when every piece of artwork takes on that odd tinge of green. Suffice it to say that unless something goes wrong on a Me level, I'll just respect her skill. They're greyscale pencil sketches with interesting shading, and for now, that's enough.
I'm going to judge based on the aspect we both share: the text.
(But any time she wants to go after me for my art, just assume she wins. It's faster.)
Chapter 1. Once upon a Time
(No, really.)
Let's talk about opening sentences.
In the past, I've said that a fanfic writer may have about ten seconds to make an impression. You can't hook a reader immediately? Well, there are some with enough patience to reach Sentence #2, and there are others who are already on their way to the next entry in the New column because let's face it: this is fanfic and on a busy site day, there will literally be another story along in five minutes. But with published books... well, someone just slapped down twenty dollars for this hardcover, and fanfic is free. Free means it's easy to step out of a commitment, because you don't have as much of one. Twenty bucks creates a certain obligation to convince yourself that you're having a good time.
But still... as a writer, it can help to have the first sentence set the tone immediately. Chris' old blog occasionally featured analysis of opening lines, just to show how effective (or not) they could be. As a writer, this is your best shot to cast, hook, and reel someone in. You are introducing them to world, style, mood, and tone: the goal is to get them onto Sentence #2. And beyond.
You don't have the advantage of a movie trailer. You can't just put your best bits at the start of the book and hope everyone decides to see what connects them. (Well... once in a while. In media mes, after all.) You have to open with your strongest punch. You have to Sans this thing, because you are in fact never getting a second chance to make a first impression.
My own record with openers is, charitably, dubious. The one on Triptych is fairly indifferent. On The Application... arguably has a clunker. Bitter/Sweet needs a full paragraph, while Soul Survivor at least manages to create 'something is very wrong' in five words. But every so often, I do manage one.
The Bearers looked down at the corpse.
That's a very simple opener: who's there and what they're currently doing. But it brings up some questions, doesn't it? What happened before we got here? Are there some details we should be filled in on? Whose corpse? And so a few people keep reading.
Or, for Captains Crash:
"Life," Spitfire philosophically said as she carefully took her place on the central bench behind the judges' table, staring out towards the cloud-padded huge open pasture which was about to host the first Wonderbolts open tryout session of the year, "is like a hurricane. And so are applicant judging sessions."
Why do I feel that much longer version works? Because of those first five words of dialogue. Most of the people going into this know it's a Ducktales crossover. And by using those five words -- the opening line of THE Earworm -- I'm trying to openly reassure them. It's okay. I know the material. Shall we go? Sound one familiar note and let the reader's mind bring in the orchestra.
I'm talking about my own work here because as the joke goes, no one else's is mine to discuss. I can say what I was trying for, and where I failed. But I feel that I know a little about starting a story, even if I don't always manage to snag the hook on the first cast. And that's why I have to poorly establish my credentials, because I am going up against the work of a published author. A bestseller. Someone who's had a movie made of her work.
I'm not on her success level. I never will be. And that means I'm plankton trying to conduct a critical review of a shark -- but I'd like everyone to acknowledge that we're in the same ocean. That I know something about how this operates, and this isn't simply the critic taking joy in tearing apart something they can't personally do. Because Anton Ego had some of it right: that it's easy to just be negative. It's even fun. And I'm not risking anything here, am I? I'm certainly not identifying the new. Established author, and that means some people will make it their mission to tear her down.
That shouldn't be the goal here. I want to be surprised. Enthralled.
Because what a critic needs more than anything else is hope.
How do you sit through a thousand bad movies unless you have something within that's still waiting on the next great one? For that matter, why bother checking on the first-timer tripe which populates so much of the New column? You know it's going to be stupid and pointless and just another grammar-free plotless power trip -- until the moment it isn't. You dig through the sewage because you're looking for the tosheroon. And if you're just there to get everyone else dirty? Leave.
I want to have hope.
So when I go to the first sentence of a novel, I'm searching for enchantment. The stirring of curiosity. Whatever it takes to get me to Sentence #2. Because you never know where that next gold nugget is, do you? All you can do is search, sift, and hope.
And this is the first sentence of Reckless.
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal.
...
...what?
Okay. Take it slowly. It's night and we're in an apartment. We have a setting.
like a dark animal
And questions. I also have a few questions.
Look: one of the accusations I get hit with a lot is abuse of white space. Letting the reader's mind fill in the blanks, encouraging your imagination to do some of the work. When it comes to charges of being less than fully descriptive in the supposed service of the story, you can start preparing my cell now. But
like a dark animal
even with white space, you need to draw a border on the panel.
The intent here is probably for the reader to conjure whatever animal scares them most and make it 'dark'. (I suspect 'dark' is going to take a Kingdom Hearts level of abuse in this story.) But the phrasing just threw me. It's not mood setting: it's taking an engine which was just getting into first gear and kicking it back to neutral. It is, quite frankly, making me say "So. Black cat with asthma?"
Well... first sentences aren't necessarily everything.
First paragraphs, however...
The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.
...are a problem.
We're setting a mood here. We are also stepping into confusion. Here are two (possibly three) noises which are being made by the night or in the night. Which are then drowned by the silence of said night, which is loved and worn on the skin. While breathing.
What does this paragraph make me think of? Mostly a tweenage wanna-be Goth girl (who has no idea what 'goth' actually means as a culture, but is already trying out the makeup) writing in her first diary. Her composition is perfect, and will remain so as long as no one else ever reads it.
Outside the stars were paled by the glaring lights of the city, and the large apartment was stale with his mother's sorrow.
Including herself when she's twenty, because she is not going to take that well.
Let's set a little more of the scene. Jacob's stealing a key out of his mother's room. His brother has a nightlight on, because light/dark is going to be a theme here, I just know it! And his father has been missing for more than a year, with no one cleaning the study so that Jacob can write 'Come back?' in the dust. (Presumably no one ever sees that, because no one's cleaning.) Also, there are pistols. In a cabinet. Because his father collected them. And may have had a middle name of 'Chekov'. The world will never know.
So Jacob is twelve. And in this silent-yet-breathing night, he has a tantrum because Disappeared Dad is in play and he hasn't even gotten a Disney option yet. He tears down books and model airplanes. And in doing so, he dislodges a piece of paper from one book. It has symbols on it, rendered in his father's handwriting. Plus a sentence on the backside.
THE MIRROR WILL OPEN ONLY FOR HE WHO CANNOT SEE HIMSELF.
Yes, little girl, I know you blinded yourself in order to enter a land of magic, but our mirror doesn't care. Move on with your life. While using a cane.
Anyway, there's a mirror in this study, one where the glass is too warped to provide a decent reflection. Also, there's roses on the frame, so our tween is on a roll. And Jacob closes his eyes, then feels behind the mirror for a lock and finds his reflection looking at him. While his eyes are still closed, so kudos for action tracking.
But then he puts his hand on the glass (covering the image of his face), and it decides he's Miles Morales. Cling low, sweet portal to a magical land, coming forth to carry him to what I'm guessing will, in a few hundred pages, be revealed as his true home. It's no longer reflecting the study and when he turns around, he's no longer in the study. He's in a ruin of sorts, standing on gnawed bird bones. While barefoot. Also, there's bloody feathers around, he's in a tower, and there are two moons in the sky because nothing should trigger the 'Either I've lost my mind or I'm in a Young Adult novel' reflex faster than an extra moon. And how does Jacob react?
Well, quite reasonably, he's afraid. But it turns out he likes fear, because fear makes him do stupid things and when he's being stupid, he can temporarily forget about his father. And before you question that too closely, when was the last time you had too many drinks after a bad day? Right. This is the tween boy magic mirror version.
So before Jacob can really explore, he's attacked. Something spidery, which takes a bite out of his hand. This makes him cover the mirror again, which brings him home, and then his brother Will (who woke up somewhere along the way) finds him in the study, where their mother told them they're not supposed to go. Jacob just wraps up his hand and threatens his brother, because that's how sibling relationships work: tell on me and we'll never go to the park again. And so Jacob puts careful, calm, and tender Will back to bed, because the mirror is Jacob's. Not because he's worried about, y'know, his brother going through and getting bitten. No, that's for Jacob and Jacob alone. Jacob feels everything connected to the mirror is his. Jacob is twelve and is already developing a fetish for being bitten by spidery things. Jacob is going to have a very complicated love life, but the invention of Tinder will ensure he's never alone on Saturday night.
Thus ends Chapter One.
Chapter Two manages to piss me off in three words.
Chapter 2. Twelve Years Later
Because, y'know, your dad vanished, there's a magic mirror around which kind of indicates where he might have vanished to, you get bitten, and then nothing interesting happens for twelve years.
No.Thing.
Time skips have multiple uses. For long journeys, they're an effective way to say 'well, it was quiet' and switch to the destination. Sometimes the characters just take the weekend off. A good time skip can be used for literary fast travel: let's get to the interesting bits!
Or, in this case, you are deliberately obscuring. Twelve years allows Jacob to become a master of all things Mirror. Twelve years of passages in which he learns everything (or thinks he does) and the reader is left in the dark. But that's okay, because Jacob is now the expert who will explain it all to us. Oh, and because this is a young adult novel, Jacob is now twenty-four, which is still an age where the reader might entertain a crush. Is he handsome? I'm betting he's handsome. Darkly handsome.
Is this time skip fair? Sure. Sometimes we explore alongside the main character and learn with them: other occasions have them Explain It All To Us. However, for purposes of being in the audience, there's a small difference between Fellow Traveler and Lecture Hall, Seat 12S.
Maybe we're seeking out unknown shores. Or maybe we're taking notes for the test.
So now we're in the ruin, and Will is here. So is Jacob, and Jacob made a mistake. The first in years. He tells us that when he was fifteen, he was spending weeks behind the mirror. Sixteen? Months at a stretch. His mother and brother? Well, sure, they were probably calling the police to report a missing kid and worried sick about him, there's a chance the family went bankrupt paying for private investigators, but really, who cares because mirror. And no, the story doesn't talk about that part, but until the author says something about why no one was looking, we can assume Jacob didn't care because staying away for months wasn't the mistake: Will is.
Apparently Jacob was in a rush, and now Will is here. Wounded, with parts of his left forearm turning to stone. Oh, and their mother is now dead, but to Jacob, that's just an empty room to move past on his way to the mirror. A man in his mid-twenties needs to have his priorities straight.
Oh, here we are! Jacob's been making excuses for his absences. Like flights to Boston and Europe. (Wonder how well that went over when he was fifteen.) But hey, this time his brother followed him in, the little brother (twelve years older, but Jacob missed most of that), and now a fox shows up. Or a Fox.
Her fur was as red as if autumn itself had lent her its colors
All red of them.
Anyway, Jacob freed her from a trap five years ago, probably while his little brother was sitting alone in an empty apartment with no mother because priorities. And now she stays with him as a companion. She talks, you know. Also, she will bite you if you say 'Narnia'. It's a sore point.
They're outside the tower which holds the mirror. There are also creatures called Heinzels, which have red eyes, pointy noses, and sew their outfits out of stolen human clothing. We are not given a scale. They like acorns and they swarm. Are they spidery with a bite? Who knows?
Fox just wants Jacob to send Will back, because on this side of the mirror, parents kill any child which is turning to stone. But our hospitals just triple-bill the insurance for it, so Jacob looks down the hill -- suddenly, there's a hill -- at the village of Schawanstein -- because now there's a village -- look, a lot happened in twelve years, you're just going to have to take notes faster -- and there's a railway and smokestacks because this world is growing up. That's nice. Something should. I'm guessing Jacob didn't.
Oh, and here's a Gold-Raven. It wants to croak spells into Will's ear. Why does this matter? No one's saying. TAKE NOTES FASTER!
Jacob loves his brother. The text makes it very clear that this is so, even while admitting that Jacob abandoned said love for months on end, no matter how much his now-dead mother (who seems to be much more useful as an empty room) threatened to call social services on him and of course, never telling that so-beloved sibling about the mirror because that is Jacob's and Jacob's alone and clearly he is regularly abandoning his only living kin out of love.
Although he did bring him back souvenirs.
From 'Europe'.
Which has Thumblings and Watermen.
What are those?
I'm not telling you.
Because the author isn't telling me.
Will it be on the test?
Yep.
There's more than a few ways to conduct worldbuilding.
You can go slow and sure. Introduce a single element. Explain it. Make sure the reader knows how it fits.
Exploration? Come along with me, see through my eyes...
Immersion's tricky, but if you can get it to work, it's also incredibly effective. You live here. All of this is natural to you. You learn without knowing that learning is happening at all.
This is bombardment.
We're looking at worldbuilding as boot camp. Someone is screaming terms at you and if they yell loudly enough, they'll drown out your former life. You'll cling to whatever scraps of information you're given and take them as gospel because if you can manage that, maybe they'll stop screaming. The author is dissociating you from the previous environment through rapid-fire term shooting. What's a Gold-Raven? Doesn't matter, but it's important or she wouldn't be hitting you with it. How about a Thumbling? Don't ask questions, just memorize! This is a scale from Waterman skin! Who's a -- just listen! There's a hill! And a village! Don't question, don't think, don't try to put it all together, don't ask what any of it looks like, just stand in front of the bullets and let yourself be shot over and over again because we are going to worldbuild if we have to do it over your glossary-riddled body!
You don't have to understand what's going on. You just need to have enough curiosity to keep going in the hopes of getting the answers. And that's part of what worldbuilding can be: one part of the trail leads to the next. But when all you have is questions, when the terms just keep coming and no one's explaining anything...
You can worldbuild through bombardment. Just ask the dinosaurs.
...oh, right.
Anyway, no one can help Will. He is doomed. So very doomed that Jacob, as a loving brother who could just abandon his sibling again right now but then this would be a much shorter book, is going to go look for help anyway, because he made one mistake. Those words appear repeatedly throughout the chapter, by the way. In italics. One mistake. Because they are Arc Words. Jacob made only one mistake and he wants you to know that. Running out on his family over and over again? Not a mistake. Having Will come here. Mistake? It's easy to see the difference when you're thinking properly.
Oh, and in the twelve years he's been doing this, he's never learned who put the mirror in the tower or what happened to his father. Because again, we've got three hundred and ninety-four pages to get through and if Jacob had been accomplishing anything in the white space, we'd need a lot more of them to be illustrated.
Those facts are given to us as incidental details, along with the additional information -- INCOMING! -- that Jacob is the only one on this side who goes to the mirror, Thumblings steal things like the medallion Jacob is wearing, and you rob their nests because we can presume Jacob played at least one RPG before the mirror.
Jacob is climbing down the hill to look for help which doesn't exist. Fox is staying behind to watch Will. Will is not allowed to climb the tower and get at the mirror. Of course, Will is unconscious and has an arm turning to stone for reasons which will be shot at us later, so we can consider Will to have the easy job here.
In media res. Twelve years which were skipped over so that everything learned during that time could be rammed into our eardrums, and now we're back in the action. But we don't know what the stage looks like. What the actors are doing. All we have is names, and they're names which aren't being explained. We're sinking into a quagmire of questions. It's possible that answers await: that if we move forward, we'll find solid ground. But right now, we are drowning.
You know where you can get away with this? In a movie.
We could see a Gold-Raven. There's the tower. Quick flashback to the gifting of the Waterman scale. The set designer has done the work for us, the cinematographer pans across the wide shot. We have questions about what happened, but we know where we are.
This is text.
We see only what the author shows us.
And what we've been given is a list of names.
So that's the first two chapters. I'm committed to this book, although I won't go at RB's pace. But there are questions, and we can only hope for answers. Questions like 'What do Jacob and Will look like?' Notice I never described them? Neither did the author.
But in the next chapter, answers may begin to arrive.
Chapter 3. Goyl
The field over which Hentzau and his soldiers were riding still reeked of blood. The rain had filled the trenches with a muddy sludge. Behind the walls both sides had built for their protection lay abandoned rifles and
vocabularybullet-riddled helmets. Kami'en had the horse cadavers and the human corpses burnt before they began to rot, but the dead Goyl still lay where they had fallen.
...gawdsdammit.
Then it sneezed. "Your pardon," said the night. "Seasonal allergies. I had hoped leaving Canterlot would allow me to escape them."
Twilight Sparkle was too busy working her way out of the new crater in her wall to respond.
In any case, definitely looking forward to further vivisection of the specimen, especially how you point out every malfunctioning component and precisely why it doesn't work.
For those wondering: yes, I did sell Estee on the general quality of this book with the first paragraph alone.
Godspeed.
Worked for Alice
Worked for Elf Quest
Worked for Peter Parker
Worked for "Ninja High School" (The original, with Jeremy)
The whole is apparently MUCH less than the sum of its parts
Apparently someone actually liked this book. I assume this is a similar case to the people who liked Dadaism. (For those playing at home: Dadaism was intended to be the opposite of art, but then it turned out that the opposite of art is still art)
Apparently, there's a school of thought which says that when you have an ellipsis at the end of a complete sentence, you can just go ahead and stick it next to the period. So that's probably what's up with the four dots. (Except when style guides say that, they're talking about the "words omitted from a quotation" ellipsis and not the "trailing off dramatically" ellipsis, so it's still wrong.)
Oh boy, that first sentence. Are dark animals (not just any animal, mind you) particularly known for their breathing? It's not really clear what it's going for until three sentences later, with the silence. My first thought was to rewrite it as "The night prowled through the apartment like an animal," for some stronger, less-muddled imagery.
Prediction: the fox is a bargain-basement kitsune; she turns into a human woman and falls in love with Jacob.
I'll assume it was somehow story-relevant, because I otherwise don't give a damn.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png
Ouch. This is going to be some ride...!
>Goyl
I can't read this as anything but "girl" in a thick fake brooklynese.
Badass creed?
I probably play too much chess because after "opening lines", I thought something like, "most people play e4, but I prefer a more flexible Nf3 since no one expects it". But going back to story openings, I think "Twilight stepped into a puddle of amniotic fluid." is the best one I managed recently...
So just for a note to point out one of the details that might either explain or just give warning for future eye-rolls.
You aren’t just dealing with Funke here. I am fairly sure that the works are originally written in German and then translated. and I’m not sure if she’s the one doing the translating or not.
I read this book when I was a kid (reason why I'm fairly sure someone else translates because kindle edition suddenly changed and noticeable wait with unknown time for the books to be available)
I enjoyed it and am still fond of it but yeah - this work is probably better for a kid who isn’t asking all the questions yet.
I am now picturing Sweetie Belle about a month after Unstable Sale.
I mean, that's not totally off. Those kids should have died ages ago.
This sounds like Frank Miller if he didn't bold every third word.
Anyway, it sounds like there's cool ideas here, (I do like the mirror) was this her first book?
5089689
Not at all. By the time she published Reckless in 2010, Funke was a NYT bestseller. Inkheart had a 2008 Hollywood film adaptation starring Brendan Fraser.
The "author's first novel" grading curve does not apply here.
5089618
Just like there is no least-interesting number. If there was, that would make it more interesting than the next.
You know what's more satisfying about a book? If it's as horrible as you say, it makes a nice thump when it lands in the bottom of the trash can, and it's a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly to burn. Most importantly, you're only out $20 rather than $200 for an e-reader thrown in frustration across the room.
At least there's that.
This is why I subscribe the school of Give Your Characters Normal-Sounding Names, You Pretentious Twit.
*Gives you a hug*
I was thinking more, "chain-smoking trash panda," but to each their own.
Almost laughed like a hyena at that. I was sitting in a restaurant, after all, at the time.
Hey, it worked for Luke Skywalker.
Several demerits for using a tired Spongebob meme.
No one from school, or the state, or the government, ever looked into a child's multiple absences either, I guess.
The R. Lee Ermey School of Worldbuilding.
Please tell me she didn't use the term boi anywhere.
Funke must also have a degree in Don't Show, Don't Tell. (I shouldn't complain, because my stories could often use more description.) Is this the middle book of a series, in which there's descriptions of a lot of this stuff?
5089749
Let me clear this up: I paid about five dollars, shipping included. The original cover price was $19.99.
Also, first book. No pre-associated titles.
5089647
My goodness at chess basically extends to knowing some of the more obscure rules (the only thing I remember about any chess game I've ever played is the one that included me attempting an en passant capture and ended with draw via stalemate, against an opponent who refused to believe that either of those were real things), but yeah. Knight as opening move is something a lot of people forget about.
Also, randomly: Fool's mate itself won't happen to anyone who remotely knows how to play, but there are far more uses for the reason said mate is possible at all: the king's bishop's pawn is guarded only by the king itself, probably the most blatant weakness in the starting formation short of the king being on the battlefield at all.
This sounds like a fairly competent author did a writing exercise and just copied down every other sentence, then threw it on the page.
God help you with this one, Estee. You're on your own.
It's sad that "Jacob loved the night" would be a far better opening sentence. Character, setting, development, boom.
This is why people worry about you Estee.
When you write a sentence, you write a sentence.
This whole review had me smiling widely.
I was picturing something weaselly, (musteline?) flowing smoothly around the skirting-boards and chasing its tail in a circle whenever it found itself in a corner.
Estee you're a fucking gift. Seriously I had tears in my eyes
Nice, giving me nostalgia for reading Mark Reads again except even better cause it's estee.
Accusations of abusing white space lmao
That's like one of the best things about your writing style.
Anyway, looking forward to the trainwreck continuing, it's already been quite entertaining so far. The goth girl bit was inspired.
You might be the small fry fanfic writer and they the Big-Time-Published-Bestseller-Author, but somehow you've put more prose in describing a fundamental aspect of writing than they did in these two chapters. I am going to start pointing people to this paragraph to understand why throwing a campaign sourcebook at people in the opening paragraphs of their story is bad.
What is it about you suffering that brings out the words, Estee? Are you the embodiment of Art from Adversity?
5089755
Wouldn't that be a Scholar's mate? I tried it a few times in blitz games, but all my opponents already knew this one (also, whenever someone tries it on me, I have a very comfortable game).
Also, there was that one game where an opponent decided to check my king with a pawn in the endgame only to get it captured en passant. He then resigned because there was no way to stop my pawn from queening. Also, apparently if you don't set Leela Chess Zero (currently the best chess engine in the world) to play a specific opening, she'll almost always play Nf3 as the first move (apparently because this move is sooner or later played in every opening, so Leela prefers to be able to transpose; from my games, I remember when I played it and then, since my opponent responded symmetrically, transposing into the main line of King's Indian Defence, which usually isn't something you have in mind in a knight opening).
5090005
No, Fool's mate involves the "fool's" moves being the king's bishop's pawn, and then the pawn that would otherwise be able to block the queen that is then used for the mate itself. Scholar's mate admittedly ends with a guarded piece on the actual square, but they're both operating on the same principle in the end.
this reminds me of a novel someone wrote based on some of the "thieve's world" short stories. since i enjoyed those stories, i thought the novel would be good.
but in the first chapter someone gets into a fight with a [made up monster name with no description whatsoever] and "fought it to a standstill"-NO DETAILS OF THE FIGHT.
and that monster was not even IN the original short story that scene was based on!
i quit reading right there.
5090028
Well, for me fool's mate is more about white managing to open the diagonal to the king while leaving no escape route. But yeah, the f-pawn is always suspicious.
Honestly, from what you’ve mentioned it reminds me of badly-proofed technical documentation what with the bad/awkward phrasing and the incomprehensible jargon everywhere from the get-go. You haven’t mentioned enough to know for sure whether it’s as dry as hardtack in the Saharan summer, but I can’t say I’d be surprised.
That said, this is an excellent morale booster in other ways - I have a notebook of shame where I used to write my cringy fanfics when I was younger, and I’m pretty sure most of what I wrote in there isn’t as bad as you’re making this out to be. (It sure as hell wasn't as bad as ‘One Extraordinary Time’, but I think I’d have had to try to be that bad even at 11.)
Looking forward to seeing how you skewer the rest of this masterpiece of fail!
Assuming that his indifference was matched by her unrequited love, it most likely broke her liver.
For what it's worth, at least according to some authorities, "...." is the correct usage if ending a sentence, although others say it should read "... ."