The Blurt of Richard Davies - Comments

Thank you for your comments. I will take some of what you said on board as far as a re-editing text of the Blurt when I am able, though don't expect much soon. I will make the circumstances which made Davies begin his diary unaware of the way events will turn more specific.

Davies' world is built piece by piece as the narrative develops, all should become clear as (if) you read on.

As for the politics: it is not my intention to conflate the environmental movement with communism, and a full reading of the work will make it clear that my target is the authoritarian tendencies existing within all of the mainstream political parties which are first combined by circumstance, and then gather a momentum of their own to create the society the Blurt warns against.

Okay so, I am starting to read this, but first I need to get the stuff no one likes out of the way, and that's rules. I'm thinking that much like how I did when I first started posting here, were unaware that formatting doesn't transfer when you copy/paste onto this site. Therefore, all of the stuff that probably was double spaced at some point no longer is. This in turn means that for the most part, your chapters are walls of text. If you do write more things and post them on the site, my biggest recommendation is to write them in single space in word and manually space everything correctly while you're writing it and that way it transfers better to here. Either that or potentially remind yourself to edit the chapters once you're posting them here.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that it's against the rules to use the chapters for anything other than actual chapters. That means that while if this were an actual book, the first few pages would be what you currently have as the first chapter? On this site all of that needs to be moved to the author's notes. Sorry.

Now onto actual constructive criticism.

I like the idea of a story being told in a journaling format, but I'm finding it a little odd that there are no obvious signs of when a new journal entry has begun, or even just normal journal formatting in general. I'm also finding it odd that a man that had no idea what was going to happen or that he'd need to be saving some journal to prove himself would journal multiple times a day instead of journaling about the day's events at the end of the day like a normal person. So while I like the idea, I just don't think you actually achieved that format with your writing. What you ended up is a very thorough and detailed normal story, but not a journal format. You could honestly remove the first few paragraphs where it's him looking back and I genuinely don't think people would be able to tell the difference.

I like that you put a lot of detail into the story. Really, I do, but the choice in what gets detailed seems a little odd. Sometimes the narrator goes into a lot of detail abut things, but then other times he'll just casually mention something and not really explain it. 'Pending Assignment' got brought up, but I have no idea what that is. I'm assuming it's some sort of criminal justice thing due to them wearing orange, but I also find it odd that people would be assigned to 'pending assignment' as that seems contradictory. Also some of the details of the actual like green movement in this era are a little odd to me.

Also I can't tell if you're meaning for the narrator to be unreliable or if that's just happening. Either that or I'm just being unreasonably picky about the rules of this world. I understand the water credit per household, but wouldn't there be an energy credit too for every household if they're going to be really strict about everything? I'm asking that because baking a baked potato probably would diminish an energy credit of some kind, but that was never talked about. Then again, I also find it odd that the green movement of all things is being compared to communism (probably not actual communism, but just like, labeled communist, but still) and nazism (technically dismissed as 'bad humor', but it happened). That's not to say that an ureliable narrator is a bad thing, 'cause I've read awesome stories with an unreliable narrator, but I'm just trying to figure out if that's what the intention was.