Normally, for my IMHO series… I try to stick to published work. The bar is higher, and so I don’t feel as bad for critiquing things like grammatical errors, typos, and odd sentence structure. However, I’m making an exception, as I had promised YayoThe0ne I would review some of her work in the future. Specifically, I’m reviewing the first two stories she had in her archive.
I found this… quirky. The writing style is one that I rarely see, though it certainly exists elsewhere. The main character, Yayo, seems to be aware of what the author/narrator is saying. I can’t really say whether the character is schizophrenic, can literally see through the fourth wall and is aware that they are a character in the story, or some combination of the two.
The formatting is, to be very blunt, garbage, though I was surprised at the general lack of any typos that really jumped out at me. There were typos, to be sure, but nothing that halted the story for me. Much of the dialogue should be broken out into multiple paragraphs rather than a single paragraph, but this is all rather moot for two reasons.
One, this is merely published as a short story in blog format. It was not published in an avenue that requires purchase, so that lowers the standards quite a bit… two, this writing is from quite a while ago, and I can even see in the comments that people offered the same criticism. She may have updated her style since then, or she simply ignored the criticism because she didn’t care that much. Either way, me offering the same critique isn’t going to change anything.
Part 2: Never spell "elohssa" backwards; or don't buy pills from doctors in alleyways
This one had more of the same style as before, though this time the character spoke more directly to the narrator. Given the fact that the story starts with hallucinations and descriptions of pills obtained from a physician who bases their operations from behind a dumpster, my schizophrenic theory starts to look more likely.
What really jumped out at me, though, was when the character talked about meeting God. The character in the story, despite meeting God himself, claims to not believe in the Bible. This is… actually quite interesting. The only criticism I have is that God should be capitalized. He is being treated as a character within this story, so God is functionally his name. If you were referring to a more general kind of god, when there is more than one in existence, then you would not capitalize the word.
(Realized after writing this that she does indeed capitalize it, just not consistently. Oh well, I'll just leave it in.)
The references to biblical events as being experienced by the main character, all while she is generally unaware of what is happening, I found humorous as well. Either Yayo is a form of a time bending being herself, or she is indeed quite insane. And again, some combination of the two is not off the table.
Overall, for a couple of shorts, I was entertained. Despite the bad formatting, I found the dialogue flowing surprisingly well. This is probably facilitated by the general lack of plot and the short, yet winding nature, of the stories. I may need to make time to read through more of these, though I will likely just be leaving comments instead of writing a full IMHO. Short stories generally deserve short responses.
At least, in my humble opinion.
Same post on Minds
