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Comments for 'Operation Rubicon, Part 1'



J Jo
8:02 am | August 25, 2003
Thanks for the comments Arthur. I appreciate the input.

Regarding the number of descriptors: I consider every piece of writing as an exercise. Like many skills, it only gets better with practice. I try to minimize my targets for any piece I try. For this one, description was the target, and I purposefully used it at the expense of, perhaps, linguisitic balance. There were a couple of places where I knew I had created awkwardly long sentences (such as the line that discusses bayonets and testicular cancer) but, in the end, I chose to leave them in their original form.

Regarding the content of descriptors: The word "absurd" should be qualified, obviously because what is absurd for one person is not necessarily absurd to the other. Absurdity can aid in description, because absurdity can help fuel the imagination. In addition, I felt the somewhat jocular attitude of the narration worked well with my choice of linguistic style.

Regarding the sexual content of descriptors: I was honestly curious if my entire story was one large Freudian slip, because I certainly didn't mean to compare everything with sex or sexual things. I didn't note many during my scan, however, so I'll have to take your word for it.
Arthur Wellesly
7:53 pm | August 23, 2003
Also, Abe's quote is: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt". I love that quote and use it frequently, and I just had to point that out.
Arthur Wellesly
7:50 pm | August 23, 2003
"Let's role the dice" as Caesar would say.

I really like the story.. nice writing with few or no spelling/grammar errors. I have just a few things to say.

The number of similes'/metaphors used in this seems a bit excessive to me. I mean, I know it enhances the flow of writing, but the number of them seemed a bit much. Plus a lot of them compare with fairly absurd things, and, oddly enough, a lot of them sexual. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does get a bit tired.

Otherwise, keep it up. I enjoyed it a lot.
J Jo
10:17 pm | August 22, 2003
Ah, seems I absentmindedly completely overlooked the critical line regarding indents. Something to be corrected for part 2. Sorry Louis.

Historically, Rubicon was the name of a river between Italy and Gaul. The act of crossing this river into Italy by Caesar was regarded as an act of war. In literary terms, "rubicon" is used in general to denote acts whose commission define a point-of-no-return, so to speak.
J Jo
10:17 pm | August 22, 2003
Ah, seems I absentmindedly completely overlooked the critical line regarding indents. Something to be corrected for part 2. Sorry Louis.

Historically, Rubicon was the name of a river between Italy and Gaul. The act of crossing this river into Italy by Caesar was regarded as an act of war. In literary terms, "rubicon" is used in general to denote acts whose commission define a point-of-no-return, so to speak.
monitor101
8:09 pm | August 22, 2003
Did you get the name Rubicon from that low budget gay ass movie on Sci-Fi?
Dispraiser
6:32 pm | August 22, 2003
THERE IS JUSTICE!!! Hopefully enough people will see this as to actually USE indents.

A tip for the Word people to make it easy to add indents.... Someone told me this a while back, I'm pretty sure it was Wado.


Press CTRL+F

That brings up the Find and replace Menu. Switch to the replace tab.

Enter in that you want to search for ^p. Make sure that the P is lowercase

Tell it to replace the ^p with ^p^p [indent]

That will go through replacing each paragraph with two spaces ^p^p and an indent.

Finally, look at it for a few moments. Usually I end up with one or two extras at the end and a missing one at the beggining.
Louis Wu
9:48 am | August 22, 2003
::sigh::

The database DOES support indents. If you'd read the formatting section of the instructions, you'd know this.


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