Nightwatch: Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes III

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kailhofer
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Nightwatch: Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes III

Post by kailhofer »

Man, how many words did this thing total, anyway? :)

Finished reading it at 1:30 in the morning, and I need to read it again before I post any serious critique.

I will say though, I was surprised and a bit touched by the Maria flashback bits from Tinsel Rime. I haven't read that in quite some time, and I was able to feel the emotion like when I first wrote the scene. That was cool for me, because it doesn't happen very often. Plus it was neat to see how they were woven into a new situation. It was like those parts were "Forrest Gumped" into a whole new story.

Thanks, Bill.


Nate

PS-I just did a count in MSWord. Unless I did it wrong, all 3 parts of this thing together total over 73,000 words!

I mean, I guessed you'd need 45,000 more words than the 1st one, but damn, I didn't think you'd actually do it. That's a lot of work!

Gonna take me a few days just to read it all again...
Last edited by kailhofer on July 03, 2007, 03:23:50 PM, edited 1 time in total.
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kailhofer
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Re: Nightwatch: Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

Post by kailhofer »

I just re-read all the parts tonight, and my head is overstuffed. While all these bits are still freshly jumbled in my head, let me try to make sense of the notes I took.

And I should add that these are by no means any kind of line edit-level critique. There's too much to go through, and the crit would be too darn long as well. The following will be mostly random in order.

First off, for some reason, I can't look at the name Pasteel Agarwal and not think that it's some kind of anagram or code. I'm not good at figuring out anagrams, however. Maybe it's a perfectly normal name, and I've just lived a sheltered life. Is it one?

The 1st segment of the story seemed to have an energy about it that diminished as the story progressed. There were many extras, such as changing fonts & colors, as well as inserting graphics, that disappeared.

The "energy loss" may have been due to less editing to tighten the sentence structure and removing unneeded paragraphs as time went on, because I think it needed a lot of tightening in this 3rd part. There's a lot of good writing, don't get me wrong, but too many extra out of plotline thought tangents and too many sentences that could have been distilled down. It's hard to write a story that's so much inside someone's head, because so many other thoughts pop up. (It's why most editors will tell writers not to do 1st person stories--extra thoughts kill the action over and over again.) Everyone is too chatty for my tastes. My best friend the programmer would call it "loose coding".

An example of extra is the Stephanie backstory from part 2. A lot of Stephanie's psyche is laid bare in a lengthy series of paragraphs that take over 2000 words. Very interesting history for future stories, but all Agarwal would have to say to Tom or Simon is that her experiences with Gryphius affected her in such a way that if she found out people could read her thoughts, she'd fall apart permanently. They'd be curious, but would fight to the death to make sure that never happened.

I couldn't help notice things I would call "Jeff hints." These are things that Jeff tells you to work in somewhere. Having been through secret Nightwatch hazing rituals and conditioning (I twitch uncontrollably when I think of naming them) I won't spill anything, but since I also know the surprising freedom one has to create history for characters, I'm very interested to see which of them will come to fruition in future seasons.

There were a few continuity issues. For starters, in part 1 Pasteel doesn't consider himself human, but in part 3 he now does. Change of heart? Another one that glared at me was near the end of part 2 Pasteel says over the link that he knows the location of The Boy is "Bagni di Lucca, at the foot of the Italian Alps". Then at the top of part 3, he needs to be told again.

I'm not sure how any other season of Nightwatch ran, but in the one I was involved in, other Nightwatch writers critiqued and checked the heck out of each other's stories. Is that not the way it is anymore? Because I think a lot of these bits and the "looseness" of the writing could have been caught.

Is a Cray all that impressive anymore, especially in the secret number of years in the future where Nightwatch is set? Aren't the mini-supers better? My aforementioned friend the programmer used to work at Cray Research when they were based here in Wisconsin, and even gave me a tour once. He told me the 1st Cray, the Cray-1? was actually no more powerful than an off-the-shelf Macintosh from about a dozen years ago. Obviously they got a lot better, but so has the rest of the computer world, as well. I have heard that whatever their current incarnation was going to come out with something this year, but I don't know what. (A side note--the panels of LED lights on the side of a Cray, at least in the old days, had no purpose other than to make computer-unenlightened money men think the computer was doing something important and difficult. Honest. It was easier to get them to spend millions on them that way.)

I really like Tom's gun. I hope it becomes a regular.


I think the core of the whole story is a very good one and the parts fit together. This is a startlingly difficult plot concept--one I wouldn't have touched with a ten foot pole--but you did it, Bill. You dug deep and hung in there. That's quite a thing, considering parts were going online and you still didn't know how to write yourself out of it at that point.

Yes, I think it could have used more editing for maximum effectiveness, but it is still quite good.

Nate
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