First time poster.
I couldn't finish this one. I really wanted to like it, but I had to hit stop less than 1/2 way through.
I was not pulled into the character, so nothing that she did interested me. I didn't understand her motivations, who this father figure was, etc. I couldn' t keep my attention focused on it, so I couldn't really follow the plot.
The use of cliche made me cringe; black as ink, simile, simile, almost a nice metaphor hampered by another tired simile, teeth like razors, followed by another cliche.
The reading was very hard for me. She carried things on her "bock" and that made my eye twitch every time. I'm not a fan of feigned 'accents' and this just felt so forced.
That all being said, I have loved many a PodCastle story & I hope that this author puts something else out there that i can love.
Hello.
I'm sorry my reading didn't hold your attention, but I'm not feigning an accent. That is how I speak.
Not sure what else to say about that, really.
This reminds me of back when Good Will Hunting came out, and some people at my college criticized Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's lame attempts at Boston accents.
"You...know they grew up in Boston, right?" I asked.
"Uh, whoops?" was the response.
--
This is coming up in this thread, after piscean's comments, so I want to stress that this is not aimed at piscean. It's more something I've been thinking about the last few months, and this seems like as good a time as any to mention it.
Unfortunately, PodCastle and Escape Artists as a whole do not (yet) pay our narrators. (I say "yet" because I am hopeful this will change, and hopefully soon.) We rely on volunteers to read our stories, simply because they love reading them. We have a diverse group of volunteer readers that we rely on to bring the best audio experiences. They put in literally
hours of their free time just because they want to help tell awesome stories to our audience. So, I always get a twitch more defensive when our readers are criticized, or worse - raked across the coals. (FWIW, I don't think piscean was raking Amal across the coals. But I've seen it done to other readers from other stories, and, well, like I said. It makes me twitch. I'm defensive of our readers.)
Now, I am
not saying, "Don't be critical." This is a forum for discussing fiction, so
by all means be critical. But please be thoughtful, also. Remember
The One Rule. A lot of time goes into this that you don't see, particularly on the side of our readers.
One of my favorite parts of doing PodCastle is reading a story in text, and trying to match it with the right voice. Maybe this isn't
always successful - for instance, the surfer dude, who read that Ragnarok story - I don't know what we were thinking. But Amal's reading upped my love for a story I already loved, and I'm grateful for that.