Lovely. You sometimes tread a fine line between portraying something soothing with lots of detail and just making lists of possible nice things to do, and in this case you came down very clearly on the former side. I think this chapter and the one with the prosthetic chat show some of your greatest strengths in fiction: here the vividly detailed moments of calm and happiness, and there the, IDK, the sort of Let's Talk Logistics Now That Is Totally What You Read Fiction For Right? that I, at least, totally do read your fic for.
Also... I can't really be sure and I'm also not sure if you're interested in hearing this, but... I'm kind of speculating wildly that maybe this is actually intimately tied to the particular failure mode in your prose. When it works well you have detail after detail in a clear narrative style that's so unadorned as to almost disappear; when it doesn't work, you either sound like a textbook (as in a few places earlier in this series), or... almost childish like you don't know what style is and are writing like an eight-year-old: this happened and that happened and then the other thing happened and then and then and then... (as in the beginning of this fic, where I pointed out a certain clunkiness). Which had struck me as odd before, because you do know how to handle style well (you do it in your poems all the time). Is this an accurate assessment? Are you trying for a very detailed style that's also unadorned enough to fade out of the reader's notice?
(Now I'm wondering what would happen if you tried to write your prose in the same style you use for poetry, and then just removed the extraneous line breaks.)
IDK, it's up to you if you want to worry about style, anyway. The content's good enough people keep coming back regardless, right?
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-16 06:19 am (UTC)Also... I can't really be sure and I'm also not sure if you're interested in hearing this, but... I'm kind of speculating wildly that maybe this is actually intimately tied to the particular failure mode in your prose. When it works well you have detail after detail in a clear narrative style that's so unadorned as to almost disappear; when it doesn't work, you either sound like a textbook (as in a few places earlier in this series), or... almost childish like you don't know what style is and are writing like an eight-year-old: this happened and that happened and then the other thing happened and then and then and then... (as in the beginning of this fic, where I pointed out a certain clunkiness). Which had struck me as odd before, because you do know how to handle style well (you do it in your poems all the time). Is this an accurate assessment? Are you trying for a very detailed style that's also unadorned enough to fade out of the reader's notice?
(Now I'm wondering what would happen if you tried to write your prose in the same style you use for poetry, and then just removed the extraneous line breaks.)
IDK, it's up to you if you want to worry about style, anyway. The content's good enough people keep coming back regardless, right?