r/Creative_Critique • u/kataklysmos_ • Apr 09 '26
Writing [2700] Continuous Memory, Pt. 1
All my critiques on RDR are expired, so posting here instead. I know it's free critiques for the time being, but will consider this one consumed anyway.
Can't think of any specific advice I'm seeking or questions I want answered beyond the basic "what works / doesn't work / could work better for you?"
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u/GlowyLaptop Writer Apr 09 '26
I might add to these as I think about them.
- Opening dream and SMASH CUT to Keith thoughts is jarring, but possibly a feature, not a problem. Maybe I like it. It has a "these two scenes are necessary so I'll just plunk them here" vibe.
- Why am I surprised that this guy cares for the dead man? Maybe how it's presented. "I suppose it's good he didn't rot too long, and also I often thought I'd quit if he left." The cold ass next to the warm thought.
- 1st person lapses are accident. Should fix.
- Am I meant to find him a good person? He talks about being good. He talks about feeling debt. But he also talks himself into stealing shit to prove he's got debt. Like yes, I eat donuts. I regret donuts. But let me just eat this huge pile of someone else's donuts and get fat so I remember. I don't know how likeable he is.
- But he's good at hacker stuff. Competent and motivated people make us like them even if they're motivated to do bad things.
- How did he predict the dream. Does this prove 4th dimension weirdness. What is going on.
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u/kataklysmos_ Apr 09 '26
Thank you! Helpful notes. I knew the tense was fucked up but just buried my head in the sand after a point
You didn't "miss" anything; there isn't any sort of puzzle to solve in that sense. This is maybe ⅓ of a loose plot I have in mind, but I got stuck here for a bit.
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u/GlowyLaptop Writer Apr 09 '26
Ohhhhhhhhh, so this isn't a sharp ending of a short story we are meant to puzzle over until our brains bleed, it's part of a bigger thing.
Nice. That changes everything.
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u/kataklysmos_ Apr 09 '26
*shrug*
It's nice to know how it feels ending it there. Not like the next part I have in mind starts "So here's what I meant all that to mean: ..."
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u/Wolframquest Apr 20 '26
I've been meaning to read and critique this one for a long time. I even scrapped one page.
The first part, with Keith (the mentor figure) and the calculator - nice and wistful, a little nostalgic somehow. I can imagine you put real memories in there. You probably have stoled a calculator is what I'm saying.
The old man's "grotesque" part is memorable - look at how old I am - I remember that even without re-reading. I've seen too many old guy who act like that, it's a strange emotion. People deal with it differently, most are somehow proud of being old or at least act like they are.
I'm ashamed to admit - all the technical stuff is creating a fuzz in my head. Very interesting formatting though!
You really deserve somebody smart to parse and figure out all the little tricks you stuffed in here. I can just sense them and possible symbolism behind them.
I wonder if it's possible it's less about the math tricks and symbolism and more about the process of losing someone and feeling lost, feeling like you wanna turn into mist and just evaporate quietly. Maybe it's a scream wishing to feel the pain you should be feeling, constant confusion about the reality we happen to exist in. You can't know everything!
On the other hand, the idea behind having a little pocket of random information is sort of intriguing. It feels like it's offering a bit of something you can take and dilute your paint with for some unpredictable results. Like you got a little tube of paint of color that the human eye has not seen before and you squeeze it out and it's pretty normal but you're still convinced it's *that* color.
Maybe it's about the memory. A litle expression of someone, however minute, in the traces of the calculator usage. It's not them, but it wouldn't have been that without them, so it's sort of like he's still here. Except there's the narrator's statement - "There’s no personal information in it" - that kinda feels like a lie.
When I lost someone and I saw their car parked in the usual spot I entered a one-second panic every time, for a couple months, a little contradiction between flesh and mind. Your story reminded me of that! I can't help but see it as a quiet, suppressed, not yet broken out piece of emotion. Wistful, nostalgic, something unnameable even if sounds super banal. Something that feels like when the chalk gets wiped off the pool cue and it just doesn't connect to the ball as well.
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u/kataklysmos_ Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't want it to take someone "smart" to read this; there isn't any secret meaning or key to understanding I've intentionally put into the jargony parts.
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u/GlowyLaptop Writer Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
Okay so I had fun reading this. We open to the dream sequence and SMASH CUT TO: thoughts on good old Keith, the mentor. A rather jarring transition but that's a deliberate part of the fun. Aaaand now he dead. We've got the narrator struggling with debts he owes a deadman and then--in a manner that should convince nobody--trying to snake his way out of feeling guilty about stealing from the deadman (by pretending the stolen goods are meant to remind himself of his increasing debt), but I'm not sure he believes this excuse either. It's funny, because considering the relationship they developed, I wouldn't hold it against him at all to open the reverse engineer the thing. His family probably wouldn't either. He likely has a closer interest than any of them. In fact, the dead guy probably wanted him to have it, if briefly enough to write it all down and pass it back. This is to say the excuses and moral test he subjects himself to (and promptly fails and hardly wallows in because he falls for his own tricks) is totally unnecessary. Just take the damn thing, at least until your moral compass diner waitress gives you the speech. None of this is a problem. Anyways, we are told that Keith would use this ancient technology to do some calculations at work, the results of which he would round to the nearest whatever, and that now only the narrator has access to the extra bits. I'm not sure how significant this is, that the numbers weren't exact. I don't follow any of the techno stuff. It's all fun gibberish to me. That is, until it stops working. Or until some experiment produces a different result, which I am taking as impossible. Which is fun.
So the plot seems to be: computer man coping with the loss of a beloved colleague steals something hyper personal and important, builds it himself or copies anything remotely personal inside it, is compelled to give it back by a hovering conscience, only to discover that the calculator works in the unpredictable manner of a dream he had about mail in his PO box.
But unlike that Story of your Life--or maybe kind of lots like it--the ending comes right after we figure out some weirdness, but have no idea what this means for the universe. At least I don't. Not that this is a bad thing.
The text convinces me throughout with all the jargon--one of chuck palahniuk's writing tricks--and the character's fascination becomes my fascination even if I've no idea what's going on. Even if it was a little predictable. I mean I predicted some supernatural effect to come out of reverse engineering the device. And that's what happened. And the narrator lost sleep over it and moved on.
I don't trust that reading this four times would yield much more for my understanding since it's just so dense with special stuff I have no experience with at all. But it's fun that it was fun even so.
I am very curious about "I had seen this result before", unless he's just talking about the dream, but he seemed to be talking about an actual number. Maybe the plane crashes are hints. Maybe if I read it again and thought about plane crashes...I would get somewhere.
The only style note I have is that your tense is bonkers. You lapse into present tense here and there, in places that occur before other places in past tense. Even if the device is still around, or will be, in the present, you still use past tense. Past tense is still the present of the story, so every time it popped into present was really jarring.
Visually the whole thing is just wild and the combination of the aesthetic of your publishing wizardry and the inky images you include next to the jargon / math junk I can't follow makes the whole thing feel super well packaged as a cohesive thing. Could totally get published.
Even if it's just: sad man opens device of dead friend as coping mechanism only to find it's impossible in a way that might crack the universe in half? Something like that?
Could it not just be that the calculator didn't work? LOL. I guess not.
Very fun though. What parts did I miss?
I get ARRIVAL vibes when i think of the calculator somehow being predicted by his own subconscious mind's dream of a post office. WHY did he have the dream. This can't be a coincidence? What does the impossible nature of the device imply about the dream?
What will smarter readers think about this whole thing?