#Jakob's Children Ch9 extract

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hybrid jay
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Dream sequence from my book. CW metaphorical death/mild body horror

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Yui ran through a maze in endless blackness. She was pushed along like a log flume barreling through countless twists. Left. Left. Right. Right. Too many turns to remember. Finally, she saw a light.

Yui fell out of the night sky, light as a petal, into Ciel's arms. She smiled, a warm glow blanketing her body.

"Again!" Yui demanded.

Ciel tossed her up, where she spun among glittering stars, before once again alighting in Ciel's arms. Yui's body was small in the telestial's hands. Ciel hugged Yui tightly, rubbing their cheeks together. Yui giggled.

"That tickles."

Silver-haired telestials danced around them in the forest clearing. Petals descended on the breeze under flower garlands strung between columns. Yui flew to the top of one in a single bound. Ciel alighted on the column next to her.

Yui felt like she was forgetting something.

In the distance, a glow reflected off the clouds. Yui knew she had to go there, but she didn't know why. She leapt to the next treetop, but Ciel caught her hand, stopping her, eyes worried.

"Let go!" Yui screamed, suddenly furious. Ciel recoiled as if struck. An echo of fury resounded back through Yui like whiplash. She fell to the ground, on her hands and knees in the dark forest.

"What is this?"

What is this? What is this... Her voice and confusion echoed around her.

Yui leapt to fly again, but she couldn't make it more than a few feet off the ground. She began to run.

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2/2

Next to her was a winding river. Yui followed the river, with Ciel running beside her. The water was clear and beautiful, rippling over smooth stones. It ran abreast of a towering bluff of crumbling shale, then into more forest.

It felt like days that she ran. Sometimes it was dark, and sometimes the sun reflected off the glasslike ripples of the river, a promise of coolness.

After some time, Yui noticed that the skin on her hands had lost its luster. As she watched, it became thin and wrinkled. Alarmed, she tried to stop running, but she had forgotten how. Icy terror gripped her. Her legs kept pumping, carrying her onward. Liver spots appeared. Her flesh shriveled and rotted.

And she kept running.

When Yui's legs finally failed, Ciel scooped up her crumbling body and kept running. A cold tear dripped onto Yui's skull.

Up ahead, the river flowed into the mouth of a cave. The air grew cold as they crossed the threshold. Ciel slid to her knees on the muddy ground where the path ended and the river turned a corner and went out of sight. She sobbed, clutching a glowing pearl that was all that was left of Yui to her chest. Yui couldn't think anymore. She couldn't move. She couldn't speak. Ciel's face hovered above her, beautiful even twisted in sadness.

Ciel's sobs quieted. Her lustrous wings drooped. Slowly, reverently, she lowered Yui into the water, where Yui floated. The cold current took Yui from the cradle of Ciel's fingers and bore her deeper into the cave, around the bend and into the unknown.

hybrid jay
lucid vine
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@hybrid jay it's nice blobHeart I like the aethereal and light atmosphere

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though it's probably best enjoyed with more context!

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are you looking for feedback or not really?

hybrid jay
# lucid vine are you looking for feedback or not really?

wasn't looking for feedback specifically but if you've got feedback I'd love to hear it! tho depending on what you say i might not have much to say about it, i tend to sit on feedback for a while especially if it's critical as some stuff takes me time to absorb

hybrid jay
lucid vine
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I get that, critical feedback makes me want to crawl back into my box and go “never again” lol

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the one thing that stands out to me, but it might be related to that sequence specifically, is how your sentences are formed after a “subject + action” model

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pretty much all of them

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Yui followed, the riven flowed, she tried, a tear dripped

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it can give a feeling of disjointedness but again, maybe that's what you were looking for

hybrid jay
lucid vine
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add structure diversity, change angles

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hold on

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if you take The Aching Maw for example, this section is similar in style to your writing, lots of “subject + action”, but you'll notice some diversity:

  1. not only descriptions but emotional insights
  2. structure diversity with some inserts at the beginning of sentences
  3. tense switching
  4. and at the end, a total switch in structure and angles which makes the preceding repetition act as a buildup to the emotional reveal
image.png
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you can totally chalk that up to stylistic preferences, but it might be that it's something you tend to overdo a little? going over your writing with that in mind will tell you

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oh also that's just my perspective, and repetitions of all kinds are my pet peeve, probably beyond reasonable levels

hybrid jay
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Nah it's valid

lucid vine
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here's an excerpt of something I wrote yesterday, too. In this I pay extra attention to having no structural repetition at all, which gives it more of a retro feel imo. Notice how each sentence starts differently. Pronoun, adverb, interjection, idiom etc.

My dear John,
I came up here looking for the thought of you. Why? Well, they would say I am closer to you here, but as you know I don’t believe in those things. Really I think it is the solitude. Nowhere else in the city can I gaze upon its tumult and be alone with myself. Even the sound of all those frantic machines ceaselessly moving about does not reach me here.
Oh, I know… You would scold me for wanting to run away from it all. You and your machines! Understand this, my dear: only then, when there is just me, can I remember what it was to be with you. Only when I lift myself above the smog and the people, and the city turns into a plan of itself, can I summon in my mind the cherished times we shared. Trust me – were my tired knees to abide by my wishes more, I would come here every other day. The elevator is a blessing, for that matter. Come to think of it, this is probably the furthest I can travel from home without paying for it these days! What a funny thought… Or is it sad?

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sentences are also of variable length which I think fits well there

hybrid jay
# lucid vine sentences are also of variable length which I think fits well there

I can definitely learn from this chatmignon It's not something I've explicitly thought about while writing but looking over my stuff, I do tend to err on the side of repetitive, and when I'm writing I'm generally trying to do the bare minimum to try and get the emotions across but there are a few structure changes here and there for effect. this will probably be one of the last things I do when finalizing the book, vary the sentence structure

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For example here's a para i wrote recently and the last sentence has a pretty big structure change that makes it stand out among all the rest

The telestials sprang into action. Fingertips tickled her ribcage. A tugging on her bandaged hand. A warm wipe on her ears. Suddenly, Yui's breathing grew easier. Sweet air filled her lungs. She could have laughed. She coughed wetly into the ringing silence. The absence of pain, and now to breathe again—it was bliss.

lucid vine
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structurally it works well! it does have a similar bumpy feeling due to the recurring short sentences

hybrid jay
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the more tense it is, the shorter i go generally

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i got long sentences in my more chill scenes

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here's something from a more relaxed moment

Yui's usual strategy for dealing with people trying to help was to ghost them til' they lost interest. Ironically, she had already tried that with Ciel, and it had nearly killed her.

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and any kind of reflection tends to go long as well

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Yui watched his back as he walked through the doorway on his own two feet, his telestial following close behind. In the lonely melancholy that followed, she had a sinking feeling. If, like Leo thought, this was meant to be some kind of rehabilitation, then by jumping out of that portal, she may have messed up even worse than she realized. She was so stupid.

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long vs short is definitely something i think about a lot

lucid vine
lucid vine
hybrid jay
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that is, something is happening during this dream that is very bad

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in terms of real world consequences for yui

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ig im imagining almost like a little red riding hood/fairytail vibe

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detached

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idk

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there is some kind of vision there