Deal With the Devil

[Varine]

The story is basically about a man that accidentally becomes friends with the devil. I have about ten pages done, I expect it to be around three quarters or half way completed thus far.

Anyway, this part of the story takes place in the early 1900's. It's primarily building up to climax, fairly slow. It's mostly focused on developing the initial relationships between the characters, and to build up the tension of what's to come.

 

[thewrongvine]

I must say it's very interesting.
The beginning for me felt a bit strange/choppy with all the commas, but besides that, I enjoyed this. I can feel the tensions and air around the characters when they speak or think.

 

[DM Cross]

I enjoyed some of the subtle things you added. The messenger waiting for his tip because he "wasn't eager to leave without it" was the one example where I really took notice of it. The overall writing style was a bit bland for me, sometimes it seemed like you were taking the long way to get to a point, as if reaching for more words. But that might just be because the style wasn't really what I'm used to.

You kept the dialogue true to the time, that politeness that we've forgotten in the modern times, which is both difficult and commendable, great job there. I like the concept you revealed toward the end as I didn't see it coming, really. I have a similar story line for the same situation (Creation) for a series I'm writing, so it was funny to see someone going the same route.

I see what Vines was talking about with the choppy comma usage. But I think it worked for the situation. It came across like you were desperate for someone to understand what you wanted to say but you were afraid of misunderstanding. So you constantly had to add another part to each sentence, trying to be clear. It worked for the mood you set for the story, so whether or not it was intentional, really good job with using basic sentence structure to create a feeling in your writing. I like it!

Post more when it's available, I'll keep reading.

 

[Varine]

It IS a first draft, more or less. I've gone over it a couple times, as I'm considering the first of basically two chapters, with the second being the aftermath of the meeting, in which there will somewhat more 'action', as far as these kinds of stories go.

The choppiness is intentional, although I did not expect it to be as noticeable as it seems to be. The point of it was that it was designed originally to be read aloud as an audiobook of sorts, so it would have been less choppy having been read by myself, and more just generally circumlocutious, but I think it does help when reading it out loud, which I've been doing personally for this one because that was the intention. But I changed my mind when making plans for it kind of, and decided to make it another short story. But I wanted to maintain the same environment, and kept to the concept of being 'spoken' by someone in the first person, and in consideration of the story and time period, the character was not keen on getting to the point of his best friend being the devil, so really avoiding the point, but giving some hints that Lantas was more powerful than he gave the appearance of.

The point of the first half, however, was kind of an odd take on religion from my (admittedly short) studies of it, showing a different concept of the entire good vs. evil thing without being preachy, and ultimately my goal was to present the devil as a more or less nice guy that just had a shitty job, before getting to the real meat of the story, which I'm working on now and is a little more straightforward now that it's gotten to the point that he was trying to avoid really saying until he had to. Like I said, I wanted to humanize the character, but keep to the 'spoken story' kind of thing it originally was. I'll have to go over it and see if I can rework the syntax; I don't want to lose the circumlocution, but I do need it to be easily readable.

 

[OMGOMGOMG]

This was a good read, and I liked how you did the religion part, how the devil wasn't that 'evil.'

 

[Varine]

Well, it comes back around to it in the next section kind of when it gets deeper into the concept. But yes, the goal is to portray it as a slightly different course of action than is typically used.