Poll of the Day > How is the prologue to the short story I am working on turning out?

(+) Yeah! (+)

So I a foreword is that I am not trying to appropriate culture but am merely using a persecuted minority group or multiple if you will to give a ancillary glance into how bigotry can be harmful (I know I am beating a dead horse and that my sophomoric attempts at messaging will be eclipsed by greater works of the future, past, and present). I mainly did this though because I dont want to make another cishet white male protagonist even if I am one IRL... Not trying to be a bigot there is just a deluge of those out there in fiction. Basically this will be a sci fi story where it takes place in the battle of analog vs digital tech as CRTs were being phased out by LEDs. I am imagining worlds that I hope to portray based on all the analogue tech and digital tech. Groove grove for instance based on the grooves of a record. Concurrent City fueled by hydro power. Turbine town (air powered), Solar Station (a large train powered by the sun that transports throughout the analogue realms. I am hoping this drawing course I am taking on udemy will help me be able to actualize my visions into a visual novel type game.
" LIVING IN ANALOGUE REALMS"


Prologue
Tabitha Edwards is a Jewish college student who transitioned at a young age to become female. In a small college town in the middle of America in 2005 she struggles to maintain her life as she is ridiculed by her peers and failing in her schoolwork. She finds solace in the abstract worlds of video games.
Her last bit of money was drying up as she was fired from her job. As the ephemeral pleasure taking her hormone pills to achieve the visage reality, she desires coincides with her routine she begins to play a video game. She receives a call from home that her grandfather her last known family that supported her after her parents met their untimely death has passed away.
Is life even worth living, she would soon fail out of college, a community college at that! She never was good at games, but she enjoyed the escape. She wanted to escape for good this time into another plane of existence where she would not be misgendered or insulted. She begins to inhale the whole bottle of medicine. After a plethora of time passes, she begins to wheeze and cough up a puddle of blood. As she lay in front of her CRT TV gasping and gargling blood, she came to the sanguine realization that the end of her suffering was near.
Suddenly static on the tv appeared and a hand sculped of electricity grasped at her perishing form. She was seized into the TV, into the analogue realm.

Sorry didnt read past the first sentence

EvilResident posted...

Sorry didnt read past the first sentence

Sorry to bore you :(

Ending of that snippet is a pretty cool hook though, and the premise is interesting. The prose has some weird grammar/phrasing choices and sounds a bit awkward. You're also kind of just informing us about her situation for the first couple of paragraphs. Show, don't tell is a cliche writer's advice for a reason. It gets the reader more invested in the character.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

As the ephemeral pleasure taking her hormone pills to achieve the visage reality, she desires coincides with her routine she begins to play a video game.

this sentence in particular.

PMarth2002 posted...

Ending of that snippet is a pretty cool hook though, and the premise is interesting. The prose has some weird grammar/phrasing choices and sounds a bit awkward. You're also kind of just informing us about her situation for the first couple of paragraphs. Show, don't tell is a cliche writer's advice for a reason. It gets the reader more invested in the character.

this sentence in particular.

Thanks I will try to keep the show not tell part in mind.

The villain will be digital man (based off analogue man from digimon world).

i envision this short story as Digimon and Lion a witch and a wardrobe.
Lots of analogue and digital creatures but she wont catch or raise them. She will communicate and fight with them. Ultimate goal to save the analogue realms from the digital threat.

I am thinking of ending it on a cliff hanger too idk

PMarth2002 posted...

The prose has some weird grammar/phrasing choices and sounds a bit awkward. You're also kind of just informing us about her situation for the first couple of paragraphs. Show, don't tell is a cliche writer's advice for a reason. It gets the reader more invested in the character.

This is my first impression. I get wanting to break away from cishet white male protagonists for the sake of mixing things up, and that's fine, but explicitly listing which minority groups the character falls into is just an awkwardly hamfisted way to do it. Instead of rattling off a laundry list of character traits to fully-establish the character before she does anything, describe what she's doing and use that context as a means to convey more information indirectly.

As an exercise, you might want to try rewriting it with a cishet white male protagonist. If, after doing so, you read a passage and it comes across as an awkward way to communicate how cishet, white, and male the protagonist is, it's also an awkward way to communicate how trans, Jewish, and female the protagonist is and you should change it. Remember that while it's good to have a more diverse protagonist, if you go out of your way to point out her diversity, it just comes across as tokenism.

Pro tip.
CRT is digital.
Those are digital pins on the input.

Does being trans affect the story? Or do you just feel like making the character trans? From the prologue it seems to be a standard isekai where a loser with nothing in real world becomes super awesome hero in another. Does the character immediately become the sex they want to be when they get transported?