Gaynamics

Come on now, don't label me as a homophobe right away just because of my immature pun. Read the review first, and then label me. Today I read Dynamics by Maria Santicelli. By the way, her story starts with like a ten page rant about how you can't use it or look at it or even get droplets of it on your kindle until you PAY like a MORAL and HARD-WORKING member of society! I hate when authors are only in it for the money, so please go steal her story and use it for firewood or whatever.

(Link)

Here's a little description she wrote up, just for this blog post:

"Army ranger Ty Black muses about the group dynamics of his camp in general and his all male team in particular. It's not easy living the army life, especially in close quarters.

"Dynamics" is the first part of a series that centers around the life and relationships of army ranger Ty Black and his team mates. Nothing runs ever smoothly for any of them, and when inappropriate, unwanted feelings make their existence known, they find it hard to deal with the consequences. Escalation seems inevitable and all they can do is grappling for personal happiness the best way they can. 

Other installments in the series / suggested reading order:"
Oh no you don't! Get that shit out of my eyes, I haven't even read the story yet and you're scheduling what I read next? A little presumptuous don't you think? This lady has it all planned out with the "step 1: write something I think is better than everyone else's step 2: money" shit. Well, Maria, why don't you focus more on the story than the marketing, eh?

That really is her problem. As I've said before, I wish people would write deep shit about our generation's wars. Not because I am interested in war stories, at all, but because I think they are an important part of finding our humanity blah blah. So I thought this was an okay story at first. It explores the homophobia and sexual frustration of an all male platoon as they go on long missions away from civilization. But I was let down when it became apparent it was all to sell more copies. It's pretty apparent from this passage:

"Still, it would be a great relief if the wannabe Italian male model would just get over his women obsessed pride and tell Hadenfeldt what he fucking wanted from him. Even if the colonel didn't feel the same (which Ty doubted) it would clear the air between them and they could all act normally again. Or as normal as life around Army guys could be. For all he cared the Don't Ask Don't Tell could go fuck itself, because when it came to a guy covering his back or saving his life he couldn't care less which way he swung. All that counted was steady aim and a cool head on their shoulders. And that they didn't hit on him because he liked women, thank you very much."

Did mention this is about Don't Ask, Don't Tell!? Now let's be clear there's nothing wrong with this message--except that it is bald-faced pandering. This isn't a story, it's just a Facebook post looking for likes, with the connected bonus that more likes means more ducats. You can even tell it's not genuine shit because of the obvious misunderstanding of human sexuality. "Hey, those guys are really good friends." "You're right. They must be secretly gay! Which I'm okay with, as long as they don't hit on me, because I only like dicks- NO! I MEAN I HATE VAGINAS! NO!!! I MEAN-"

So, unfortunately, that's all there is to this disappointing story.

Ratings:

Despite Not Having a Plot Still Managing to Have an Ending That Sort of Makes You Think: 2.534 out of 5 stars. So basically the whole plot is everyone thinking everyone else is a gay fag, then at the end it's cold so another soldier sleeps next to the main character for warmth and he gets an erection. That would be a sort of cognitive dissonance type ending, if the story had gone a little deeper than "Those fags are totally gay and just need to admit it." Especially with all the sexual abuse issues in the news lately, this story could have SO EASILY been so much more than jumping on the DADT bandwagon. But it wasn't.

Way Too Many Casually Dropped Names: 5 out of 5 hearts. Every line was like "McGalgin said to Johnson and Johnson that Cougar had left Maverick. And Jay thought, 'That's SO them, amirite, reader?'" And you find out later that that whole thing was just referring to two people and their million nicknames. This story is called fucking DYNAMICS for the group dynamics at play here, but we don't know who the fuck the group is because their name is just glossed over with almost no description as if we are intimately familiar with them. How the hell am I supposed to come to understand the intricate group dynamics if they aren't ever explained and the story ends in three pages?? GAH!

Probably Unintentional Accuracy About Soldiers: 4 out of 5 fags. Maybe I am being too critical, but also maybe the author is also more homophobic than she realizes (yes, women can be homophobic too). The characters were pretty spot on with the whole, "Hey, how long has that water been boiling?" "How should I know, what do I look like, a fucking cooking gay faggot!?" I am still back and forth on whether this is a negative stereotype for our armed forces or an important thing we should think about as a society. Probably the answer is you should BUY THE STORY AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO BUY IT RIGHT NOW ONLY ON AMAZON!

Overall: 3 out of 5 horseshoes. Yeah, the more I write the more mixed feelings I have. I don't really know how to explain it, I mean I should hate the story for my audience, but I can't help myself from liking parts of it, but then that makes me feel so... dirty and guilty but also just so... Oh... oh god, I have an erection.



If you would like to have an erection, you'll probably be disappointed when you visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Craps

Ha I'm gonna get so many hits from gamblers for that. This week I read Lamps by Marie Moorman. Okay, let's calm down on the m's there.

(Link)

Here's her description:

"A short story about Mother/Daughter relationships."

That sounds SO interesting. No, no I should keep an open mind. I wouldn't want to be accused of being a sexist now, and the pastel blue cover with the cursive is...contradicting...my expec- Nah I can't do it. This shit was boring.

I'll just give you a summary because it's effortless and it will fill some space. So a lady goes to visit her grandma because her grandma likes her to take pictures of her new lamps, which is, just fucking the most interesting thing I've ever read, and her mom tags along. BUT her mom and the grandma have an ongoing feud. But when they arrive everyone is cool. But the grandpa has cancer. And the mom decides to help them pick the vegetables in their garden, because, you know, the grandpa has cancer. THE END.

Seriously, that's all. Most boring shit ever.

Ratings:

Yes, I'm serious. There isn't any story left to review. Let's do this.

Worst Grammar Possible For a Literate Person That Can Surprisingly Spell Perfectly Fine: 5 out of 5. All I really have to say about this is, like, you know you don't have to put a comma in every time YOU pause while you're WRITING, right? It's for the reader's benefit, not so that you can take a break. Other than that, I will just let her writing speak for itself:

"After they went, out the door Grandpa turns to me and says 'I hope she doesn't yell at Dorothy, she's only trying to help!'" 

And other than the fact that this is the closest the story comes to conflict ("Oh noooo, there may be some yellin'" [there's not any]), can you spot the flaws? Do I have to point out that there is just punctuation laying around here and there and the tense changes with gut-wrenching speed?

Or how about this:

"I walk around the barn, 'How are we doing time wise?' Mom asks. 'Don't worry, finish what you're doing,' I answer. We should have been halfway back to Rochester by now, 'We're almost done!'" 

Like how in the shit do you confuse me so hard as to who the hell is talking even WITH dialogue tags? Baffling.

And Seriously What the Hell is With the Lamps? 5 out of 5. Can you possibly pick a more fucking boring topic? And you use that as your fucking TITLE!? Here's the sort of torture I have to put up with:

"I didn't know oil lamps were made in so many styles and colors. Grandma finds something different, every year. Hobnail glass, this one looks like it has snails crawling on it, that one has grooves to lay your matches in, Some are so clear they are almost invisible, until you fill them with the amber oil that makes their warm glow of light. Others are tinted, transparent, but softly colored, orange or green, like autumn leaves, or pink, like-" Shut up shut UP SHUT UP!! This isn't even a metaphor it's just fucking pointless!

Oh, Shit, You Should Probably Say You Like This Though, Cause Cancer...: 5 out of 5. Not only does the guy have cancer, but her dedications are like, "Hooooly shit, I feel baaad nooow."

"Dan- Who didn't let his disability stop him from achieving his dream.
Chris- Showed us how to live even when it was hard."
And then:
"In Memoriam - My Sons
Daniel Fogg (1980 - 2002)
Christopher Fogg (1978 - 2006)"

Now you feel shitty, don't you, for laughing at all my jokes about this story. What a dick.

Overall:  2 out of 5. Hey, I know it's cold but I'm not going for the pity upgrade. It's a cruel world, and this was seriously a boring as shit story. She sums it up best with another of her million dedications:

"To My Dad- Who bought me my first camera and told me I could do anything."

Yeah, that's right, she's a photographer. Her dream isn't even writing! COME ON!

If you want to read the stories of someone who really does dream of being a writer but falls far, far short of that and every other life goal, visit: amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

My Report About My Insanity Essay

This week I read a "story" by Jilly Jacks (if that's a real name then mine is really Blackhall, come on!) called My Homework About My Pets Essay.

(Link)

Here's a thing that describes why I chose to review this:
"Assigned to write a homework paper on a family pet, a young girl turns-in a moving essay of sadness... and of a not-quite-understood horror."

I had to read that twice because I didn't know what the hell it was talking about. Turns out the story is similar, but much, much worse--like if you wrote random words on a piece of paper then cut it up, then put that in a blender, then dropped it on the floor and left it for your mom to clean up.

At first I felt bad cause I was like, "What if some little girl actually wrote this?" No, it was just a lazy, lazy, horrible, fucking insane person. Spoilers for the end of this review--I'm just going to say it was the worst piece of shit I've ever read. And have you SEEN the shit I've read!?

Alright, I'll try to give you a plot synopsis. A schizophrenic person hallucinates that one day she finds a cat and this becomes a fixation that she repeats over and over until something happens and she stops seeing the delusion. Maybe the daily electric shock worked?

That's about it, except yeah it's supposed to be a little girl, but seriously if this is from the point of view of a little girl, this author either has never met a child or has only met extremely disturbed children. This reads like one of H.P. Lovecraft's characters trying to describe the terror of seeing Cthulhu while on cough syrup and suffering Alzheimer's on top of the normal Cthulhu-induced brand of insanity. Oh, and Cthulhu is a cat.

Here, I'll give you a sample paragraph so you can see:
"Well I don't know where he came from one fall he just came right out over there at my house after school on our front steps right there and came out to see us kids! And he was an orange and black little boy-type kittycat is what he was but he had some grey stripes on him too but mostly he was getting pretty much skinny for a kittycat and if you looked really hard on him right there you could see all those ribs of cats that they have in them sticking out right there on his sides on him right there! And I'm not even making up that part!"

And it gets worse. That was the first paragraph of the story. By the end I was seriously doubting reality. I mean, nobody could have just smeared shit onto a document like this and published it on Amazon, right? My brain is gone and I'm sitting in a nursing home right now imagining that i'm making clever jabs at people on the internet while I'm really muttering about cats to my nursing assistant while she wipes my ass.

I know this was supposed to be all cutesy and gimmicky and shit like when an autistic kid writes a book that is a best seller, but, see, the difference is that the autistic kid really wrote that book himself and had interesting insights, whereas this story was written by a full grown asshole and it comes off as if that asshole thought they could fool us by writing whole paragraphs like, "The cat, the cat, and the cat right there, the cat, he, he right there, he, the cat right there! and then my mom, and then the cat, the cat he did right there, the cat, and then the faces right there were screaming at me through the wall while I was trying to sleep." That's not cute, you're a lazy fucking dick, and I hate you, "Jilly Jacks."


GOD!



Ratings:

Having the Elements of a Story: 1 out of 5. If I really stretch and think about it, wading through the endless bullshit and giving unlimited benefit of the doubt, there is sort of a beginning, middle, and end. But seriously this is comparable to a full grown man purposely drawing like a child and attempting to sell it to me, but with none of the creativity of an actual child. There is almost no dialogue, no real conflict, no characterization, no- fuck, there's nothing. It's SO shitty. Trust me, don't read it.

Funny and Cute: 0 out of 5. I can't reiterate enough how badly this missed the mark. This is like finding a homeless guy and dressing him like a little girl to try to make him adorable. It's seriously disturbing and I'll tell you why:

Ending: 0 out of 5. Suddenly at the end the little girl finds the cat's collar and, well actually I'll just let you read it.
"Found his little red collar with no bells in it either.
Oh yes I did and it wasn't even red anymore it was partly brown like DRIED BLOOD BROWN and it was cut right through not ripped torn it was CUT RIGHT THROUGH like a CUT and I found it right in the trash behind the garage of our house back there."

Uhh what the hell? Suddenly we go full psycho. And those caps are the author's. The little girl just fucking finally lost her mind at the end there, and fuck subtlety, we need CAPITAL LETTERS to substitute for actual plot because up until this last paragraph there WAS NONE.

Overall: 0 out of 5. That's right, z-e-r-o. I already said it, but I'll say it again. This was the worst piece of shit I've ever read. There was nothing creative about it. It was like being fed an entire box of packing peanuts, one by one, without water.



If you want something more on the level of a box of crackers without water, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Eternal Discomforts

I just read Eternal Needs, and boy do I feel weird now. It's by Anne Connery (no relation).

(Link)

Here's a description which will immediately make clear why I decided to read this:

"A lone survivor adapts to a zombie-filled world where the Undead possess hunger of a different sort. 

A short story that's part erotica, part horror and ALL Anne Connery."

As I was reading this description I was all like, "Another zombie story, yaw-WAIT, erotica? Someone really wrote this and it's not a joke? Let's do this!"

But on a side note, Amazon keeps suggesting erotica to me ever since I did that review of the sexy cowboy story, which makes me sort of uncomfortable. I want to like write them a letter like, "Hey, I just got that one story so I could make some jokes. And the zombie one too, same reason. And the lactation erotica. And the animal one. Okay, the three animal ones. But seriously stop suggesting- what's this? Mermaids? Okay, this is the last one though, only because I think it will be funny. Seriously."

But if you want some more where that came from, the author of this story is also the creator of The Erotic Shakespeare: The Tragedy of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But I mean, check out her picture:

I know, right? It's like, "Now THAT is a lady that likes, you know, cats and stuff." And apparently Shakespeare and zombie erotica. I am VERY surprised this lady hasn't written a vampire one yet.

Alright let's get to it. This story immediately had me guessing because the first line is, "Even the LAST MAN ON EARTH has needs." Caps included, each and every time she uses the phrase LAST MAN ON EARTH. Haha what the hell? Now I'm stuck in this weird limbo between funny, sexy, and...horror?

She does an alright job though, I pretty much immediately forgot a woman was writing it because she does a good job writing for men. It's just a little weird how apologetic the main character is.

If you hadn't already guessed, he has sex with zombies. But of course these are cleaned up zombies that don't decay and have some body heat and are super not dangerous. So he goes and catches zombies with a collar and epoxies their mouths shut and rapes has sensual sex with them.

But it's super not sexist in any way, she really wants you to know, because he feels super guilty (and super turned on) by the whole thing. Actually when she keeps pointing it out it really calls attention to it and makes you wonder what kind of person this story is written for.

Like, what's the message, or the fetish, or whatever you want to call it here? Because she is obviously really conscious of misogyny and keeps mentioning it. The main character also carefully showers the girls and houses them and painstakingly finds clothes for them and applies their makeup.

And she wants us to know that he really likes talking to girls, it's just a necessity that these ones can't talk so that he can force seduce them into consensual sex. But while I'm reading about all these ways he makes up for his seemingly weird fetish that he would totally not participate in if there were any real live girls left, I'm like, "Wait a minute, I thought she said this was erotic? Maybe she won't put any actual sex in and I won't have to do an awkward blog post today."

But it gets very much fucking awkward, dear reader, because he does have sex with them, and they like it because of zombie instincts or something, and when they have an orgasm their eyes clear up and they are brought back to a life long enough to respond to him saying, "If you can hear me, nod!"

And if you used this story for its intended purpose during that part, you have some explaining to do to your now totally messed up moral compass. Enjoy!

Ratings:
Making You Question Your Entire Belief System: 5 out of 5. I am not convinced this is a bad story. It might actually be a fucking great story, because obviously this lady wrote this due to the fact that it's a fetish. She was fully conscious of that, but made the narrator reluctant and guilty about treating dead people like this and making it clear that his drives made him do it. But the reader willingly reads this story, presumably to get off. So what does that say about the morals of someone turned on by it? She is literally shaming you while you jack off. (And personally that pushed me over the top.)

Sexiness: 2 out of 5. Seriously though, this story had very little of the erotic or the zombie categories that are supposed to make this "zombie erotica." But again, that phrase is intended for humor. I was actually very much reminded of people that are obsessed with real dolls when I read this. The guy loves to dress up near inanimate girls and do their makeup. There is most definitely a niche for people that think that's sexy, but it's almost certainly a larger group than even those interested in Shakespeare erotica.

Ending: What_the_fuck out of 5. So if the story didn't cause a huge enough cognitive dissonance, the guy hears at the end that there is a camp of survivors three days walk away. Yes, as you might expect he looks at his padded rooms filled with pet zombie girls and realizes that he has been fucking zombies this whole time and getting off on the flashes where they come back to life mid coitus with a stranger. He realizes this, and he is sad that he has to leave. He goes to the store to get Viagra, vibrators, and Gatorade for a three day zombie sex marathon because he feels sorry for them, and no I'm not making this up. Just imagine for a sec nearly dying of exhaustion having sex with zombies, and then rocking up to a survivor colony. What the hell!?


Overall: 2 out of 5. I'm too confused about what the goal of this story even was to give it more than two points. But if her goal was to try to turn peoples' worlds upside down, to destroy my conception of reality, I would say it gets a 5.


If you want to read some guilt free zombierotica, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Just Well Robbed

Today I read Just Well Loved by Rebecca Brae.

(Link)

I just want to point out that all of her book covers look exactly like that. YOU might think it's boring, but I think that her appreciation for pastel nature scenes and Victorian narration styles are really9238fu   

Sorry I passed out on my keyboard.

Here's a description:
"A chance meeting brings new hope to a beloved character trapped in a literary classic."

Fair enough. I am a fan of the short and sweet description. I mean, it's a short story, just freaking buy it and you'll find out what it's about! But that doesn't give me much to make fun of.

I was trying to figure out what the literary classic was, until I realized her description is backwards. Way to go, you had ONE sentence and you messed it up! Actually if you take this description literally it should mean like a beloved character, let's take Homer Simpson for our example, is trapped in a literary classic, like say Jane Eyre.

But what it really means is one of those short stories where a literary character is put in. Except, instead of putting Spock in the present day or something, this story is just in the same setting as the character was in before with the same plot as before and it's not stealing because...

It took me a couple of seconds to guess it was Quasimodo, and the annoyingly formal main character and her daughter see past his ugliness to the kindhearted and intelligent man inside and befriend him. Which is different from the theme of the original Hunchback because...

The story really points out that most people are shallow and, uh, I'm having trouble putting this into words because it's such a rare theme. If only there was a common saying or comparison I could apply in this situation, but I'll just have to settle for making my own, so here goes: It's like, you can't decide whether a movie is good or not just from its poster, you know?

Anyway, Quasimodo makes friends with these people and they make a picnic date for the next day and we all learn a lesson about acceptance of other races and his whole life is solved (except he's still horribly deformed), the end. 





Seriously I got nothing else to say because this story is as utterly unsurprising and bland as tofu that has been boiled for far too long by a British chef who was blinded in a terrible accident involving a spice-throwing ninja in a salt mine. Oh yes, I will torture the hell out of that simile and force it to happen sooner or later and you will take it!


Ratings:

Annoyingly Good Grammar: 5 out of 5. The whole experience was horrible because I felt like I was reading something from the early 1900s but with far more stick-up-the-assery, like if H.P. Lovecraft was forced to edit out all the jokes in The Importance of Being Ernest while Nobokov whipped him every time he used a word that sounded too relaxed, like "amidst."

Lessons Learned: 0 out of 5. There was literally no conflict in this story. Both the lady and her daughter were immediately like, "We accept you for who you are," and were not at all scared by the hunchback's ugliness. Not only that, but he also wasn't described at all and it was impossible for the reader to be startled by him because it is taken for granted that we'll be like, "Oh yeah, Quasimodo. I saw that Disney movie." The themes and metaphors that could be drawn out of his ugly ass are all ignored too. The Goonies did a far better job with the befriending a freak thing. There was also no internal conflict in any of the three characters, despite the author setting up the mother as the clear narrator, then skipping to the little girl for a second before ending with Quasimodo randomly thinking, "F-friends?" Yeah, way to make him smarter than he looks, better leave that to your summarize-someone-else's-story style descriptions next time.

Stealing Someone's Story: 1 out of 5. I would give it more, but the key here is she didn't successfully steal someone's story, I was onto that shit like immediately. She could have changed his name and gotten more points here, but she took some creative writing class where the teacher was like, "Take a favorite fictional character and juxtapose them into your story, and let's try to stay away from, uh, weird narrative styles from the turn of last century *cough*Rebecca*cough*," and she completely missed the point. What she heard was, "You can just steal other peoples' shit, plot, characters, and all and if you put your name on it, it counts as a different story." Even fan-fiction is a step above this because the characters are put into different situations, dumbass!

Overall: 2 out of 5. The writing was very coherent and it had a sensible, chronological progression. The only things this story lacks are plot, voice, logical narration, original characters, original themes, conflict, character arcs, and any entertainment value whatsoever. Small fixes, really.



If you want to read something with characters that aren't necessarily original, but are at least have names that are changed to things like Parry Hotter, go to amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Wolverine...is the intellectual property of Marvel

This week I read Wolverine by Ulf Wolf. Hahahahaha. Really? Your pen name is themed like the things you write? That's like a guy choosing the name Blackthorn to write fantasy. Actually this guy is Swedish so, it's possible that his name is really Ulf Wolf, but I still have my doubts about a rhyming, themed name.

(Link)

Wolfstuff: Where wolf-like animal stories come from. Here's a description:

"The wolverine has not eaten for days. He has her scent. The deer is tired and bleeding, though still running. He can keep this pace up for days, she cannot. He knows that he will eat tonight. He will kill her well before dawn.

::
The warming March sun had shone all day. Although the air remained frigid in the many shadows, out in the open the surface snow was melting in its glare. Then, as commonly happens in early spring this far north, when the sun began setting and the shadows grew longer across the snowy field, the melted snow surface froze and soon the entire meadow was covered by a crust of icy snow thick enough in places to support a walking man, thick enough everywhere to support almost any child, and plenty strong enough throughout to support the wolverine..."

Et-cetera. I'm not going to post the full description because it goes on another ten paragraphs. Dude, it's a DESCRIPTION, you don't post the full short story there!

Anyway, this is a story about a minority serial rapist that chases a woman through her hometown. He can't wait to get his hands on her and it's only a matter of time. HOWEVER, in a sudden turn of events she stumbles upon some policemen, but she is hesitant to show herself because she is also a minority.

At least, that's my reading. Literally what happens is a really boring and excessively long account of a sex-hungry--I mean, bloodthirsty wolverine trying to satiate his murder rage on a hungry doe. She is about to give up when she finds some humans, and they of course save the day with guns. It really reads like it should be a metaphor though because it would be completely pointless to write a stupid story about animals, right? Right?

Since the guy is Swedish and presumably raised by wolves, I will skip the usual grammar gripe and get on to the more interesting gripes.

I had trouble connecting to these characters because they were freaking animals I don't care about. We did get to see some of the humans' points-of-view, but they were as exciting as a man that pretends he's a wolf all day and then writes a creepily detailed journal about it. Actually, I would read that.

It's pretty obvious that the doe will survive because the wolverine is sort of made out to be a crazy mass-murderer type and-- Seriously, how can you write about animals like they are people? I feel weird just summarizing this plot. But anyway, I did actually find myself rooting for both of them and sitting not quite all the way to the back of my seat, but on the other hand this effect quickly faded when I excitedly thought, "The End," and there was still another freaking quarter of this novella to keep reading. And it figures the super female defenseless deer is rescued by burly lumberjack men with guns. 

Because women can't do anything by themselves. HA! Stupid women.

Ratings:

Inconsistent Animal Sophistication Level: 5 out of 5. One minute these animals were using words like "obstreperous" (throwback!) in their internal monologues and the next they were talking about the strange men with their "fire sticks" and their "machine things" that "move" people. Seriously why would an animal not know the word for "gun" or "axe" but the word "boot" is totally commonplace to them? It just made feel like I was reading a description from the point of view of some savage that didn't understand what the big shiny bird that rode in the sky was (see my reading).

Tenses: 2 out of 5. After the first section of this, I had to go back and check because it felt like I had been suddenly hurled into present tense. And indeed, the first part is past tense. "Fine," I thought, "he's just experimenting with this to set the pace." And that excuse worked until he started messing it up. Some things would be twisted into strange sentences referring to the past in present tense, then there would be a past tense sentence just stuck in there, because if you can't figure out how to express it, then fuck it! (Writer's motto.)

Sounding Stilted Due to Trying to Set the Mood: 5 out of 5. This guy was writing part like he had just watched Planet Earth (highly likely) and part like he was trying to add suspense--which he was. The result was that every contraction and simple sentence was ripped out of the story entirely. I can't imagine talking to this guy. "Kids, amirite?" "They are a group of individuals which can not and will not be deterred from their insatiable curiosity, especially-" "Shut UP!"

Overall: 2.5 out of 5. It was mostly written well and stuff, but it was just boring as hell.

If you want to read something else that is boring as hell, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall 

The Shit

Today I read The Pitch by Adriaan Brae. You got too many vowels in your name, bro.

(Link)

Description:

"A light-hearted, satirical, look at the troubles faced by con artists in a more enlightened age."

The story is almost as short as the description, but a much larger waste of time. Also, I have no idea why there is a broken light bulb for the cover. Maybe it was a bad idea to write this story? HAH, take THAT guy who will never see this and doesn't have a chance to defend himself!

I think there were actually more grammar mistakes than words in this story. It's super easy to fix in three simple steps:

1) Read your story after you write it

2) Is there a space after every fucking opening quote mark, like this?---> "   Bob shit his pants--hard." If so, take out the fucking space.

3) If your sentence somehow manages to have any fucking punctuation at all, is it hanging outside the quote marks, like this?---> Craig sniffed. "   Did you just shit your pants"? If so, tuck that little bastard back where it goes; it's obscene to just have it hanging out there, flapping in the wind.

Anyway, in this story, the super forgettable main character with the personality of a white cardboard cutout gets a strange call on his skull implant. It's in the future, and the author really wants us to know how many cool things he thought of, like ads in your skull and--whatever, who cares?

The man on the other line offers him everlasting life for ten percent of his income until he dies. If you guessed religion, you win! It goes on like this with the caller trying to sell religion and the guy making "funny" remarks. For instance:

"   What do you mean I need to follow certain rules" ?

"    Like you can't sleep with men.".

" What ab5out hermaphrodites"   ? &

Wakka wakka?

It turns out the guy doesn't accept and it is revealed that the caller is a struggling con-artist trying to run a scam he got from the ancient con-artists. RELIGION SLAM!

Ratings:

Clever: 1 out of 5. First, all credibility is ruined by the horrible typos. I can't harp on that enough. There's also the fact that this story is like five words long, which is a good indicator that this Adriaaanie guy couldn't think of anything else. The jokes were also almost as bad as the 90's classic "Laughing out Loud"

Buy it used on Amazon for $0.01 (seriously)! Yes, that's Kelsey Grammar.

Back on track. The premise of this story is also not very clever. It's the old and tired "Let's deconstruct religion into what it literally is for some larfs," gimmick. But at that it's not worth the thirty seconds I spent reading it, especially because it assumes we'll all just abandon religion once we have computers in our brains.

Setting: 0 out of 5. I got to say I have a problem with just listing shit until the reader is bullied into realizing it's the fucking future (both in the sense that I do it too much and in the sense that I hate when other people do it). If it reads like: "Joe Spaceliver put on his nanosocks and strapped his plasmadildo to his cryobelt and stepped across the platform to the bulkhead of his spacepartment, then palmed the fazelock to his antigravmagnetodoor which whooshed up to futurereveal the spacecitytropolisplanetscape-" I GET it already, we're in the FUTURE fuck.

Subtlety: 0 out of 5. The guy might as well have called up and said, "Hey, do you want to join my thinly-veiled satire for religion?" and the story could have ended there. For it to be funny or neat or whatever the hell this was going for, I have to make it more than two paragraphs before I'm like, "Oh, he's making fun of religion. God, what time is it? Don't I have better shit to do?"

Overall: 2 out of 5. I don't even know why that many points. Maybe because he was polite enough to stop after a short time. I would say because it's at least legible, but it almost isn't. Points for trying to be clever, I guess.

If you want to read something that is obviously trying to be clever, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall.