December 9th, 2019 - Old Hope

Dear TNY,

One major fuckface of a holiday down (and one to go) and I just finished up “Old Hope” and I gotta say, I’m not mad at it.

This story has so much fucking tension which I think is the direct result of, paraphrasing hard here, Freud’s theory that every single interaction is, at its root, about sex.  The tension that comes through in this story, to me, is coming from the discord caused by believing that theory and not believing that theory.  That is the question, you know?  Is this about sex?  Really?  The MC certainly talks about sex.  So do most of the other characters.  But, they don’t talk about sex with each other.  The teacher never mentions sex at all. Hell, the only contact that could be seen as sexual is described by the author in an almost grotesque fashion (before all you haters jump in: it was the hand wiping).  But, isn’t sex what this story is about?  Or is it?  I don’t fucking know.  If our boy Freud has anything to say about it, it’s all cummy tits and mother’s labia.  But they could just be regular interactions and I’m projecting the sex. That’s the fucking discord and I appreciated it.

There were also some clever craft items done here.  So, as you are probably very aware, I’m not a big fan of the first couple of paragraphs of summary/introduction/Star Wars scroller-catch-the-reader-up.  It’s a lot of throat clearing that I could see getting cut by 33% or so, just to get us into the first scene faster.  But what I was very chuffed to see was the transition from the exposition in the rambling “me” questions. The MC finished that line of questioning out loud and in scene.  Like, if this were a movie, Bridget Jones would be doing voice over narrative and then finish the last line in scene and no one would know what she was talking about.  That was slick.

I like the stabby sentences too.  By that I mean short sentences that pack hard left turns and come out of nowhere.  When she took off her bra.  When Hannah asked about sleeping with Max.  And I really liked the teacher/essay scene.  Nice nice.

There were a few key conversations that I thought would have played better staying in scene.  The paragraph starting “The problem was…” being the most notable example.  Seems like a miss to fast forward past more opportunities to draw that tension out.

Oh, I thought the end was somewhat weak.  As in, there were a bunch of crafted pieces but I don’t think the final stitching to tie them all together was quite where it needed to be to really kick me in the heart.  But, I’ve said this in other letters, that kind of je ne sais quoi can be really hard to pin down.  Hell, it could be one poorly written sentence that’s fucking it all up.  Hard to say.

Anyway, I really appreciate you publishing this story.  I am actually interested in reading something else by this author and I believe I will seek that out.

Nick

P.S. One more quibble.  I didn’t know if the MC was a man or woman for about half the story.  And this caused a larger debate within myself over whether or not that mattered and/or whether or not it would have mattered more if my sexual orientation matched the MC. Or not.  At first I thought it did matter, the knowing. But I just kept thinking that if the writing was good enough (in this or any story), shouldn’t I be caught up in the story such that the MC’s desire was my own desire?  The MC’s gender my own gender?  All of our gender?  To be clear, this is a thought exercise for me and stopped being about this story pretty quickly.  So, while I cannot articulate if the MC’s gender is ultimately a defining characteristic that must be known in a literary work, I know that I wanted to know.  That’s probably hardwired in from evolution, the desire to know the gender of someone I’m engaging with, even though I don’t plan to do anything with the information (consciously; I get subconscious bias happens all the damn time) because it doesn’t actually matter as it doesn’t speak to the quality of the person.  Or maybe Freud was right and even reading this fictional character was an interaction and that interaction must be, by default, about sex so I need to know if it’s sex I want to be having. Fuck, I don’t know. But these questions, I don’t really know the answers to any of them and they didn’t break the story.