>>5938>>5939>>5940Hey, appreciated.
>I especially like the cinematic pulled-focus in the first paragraph.
Thanks. I put a lot of focus on that and was settled for a while before starting that I wanted to start with the word "orange" and pull back into the room.
>the parenthetical
The lyrical aspect of it was meant to be broken by the parenthetical, in part because I'm sensitive now to going too long with flow-y language, and that jump-in is where I decided I'd break things up and make the shrinking of the view clearer and a little abrupt (imagining suddenly looking down from a high window).
>Hollywood, surely? Then I suppose it was a real fire after all.
Ah, not what I intended at all, just a billboard on the side of the highway. I realise now the setting is something that was much clearer in my mind than in what I wrote. Mentally, all those childhood scenes were imagined around a town in Northwestern Ontario, with the adult ones in a larger Canadian city. In the former you do have water bombers flying overhead to distant fires (much more mundane there), and lots of narrow, lonely highways through endless forest. In the latter you can have really bad smog from distant forest fires in the summer. The fires are all real anyway, just distant in the first memory (and absent in the last). I made some vague attempts at making the distinction in setting---forest and houses in the memories, heights and big buildings and apartments in the present---but not many obvious ones.
The point with the water bomber was a very distant, unobserved forest fire. Originally it was the orange thing in that scene, but I kinda forced the colour on the school to maybe imply something about the future as structured but confining, and at odds with the things outside of it. I think that was a dubious choice. No fire in the last memory, just green in the forest, with that and the rain (that wiped out the orange smog) as entering an uncertain period (but still following a line).
>The numbers seem important.
Nothing specific about the numbers themselves. People are just very responsive to numbers and patterns (and breaking them), so it draws a lot of emphasis. The stairs down are disorganised or broken, but the stairs up are clear and regular but obscuring. A rough descent, an easy but blind ascent.
>Detritus
I see what you mean now, that's a good point. The way it's written is sort of inverted idea-wise. I was focused on the slant rhyme between "touch" and "detritus" and the other sound devices, and I didn't think about how the image/idea was building. "Detritus" definitely ends up mostly negated.
>The general haze and unreality. I can almost feel a headache coming on myself. I mean that in a good way.
Thanks. Yeah, the focus was on the delirium and oppression of the character, so I do take the headache as a compliment.
>If it's the man, why can't he read? Is this a contract? I'm altogether lost.
Technical papers and derivations are what were on my mind (tried implying it in the opening paragraph, in part from the setting, in part from errors and unfinished lines), and they definitely become hard to parse if you're away from them a while or they're messy. The inability to read it is meant to be likened to an illiterate child, so yeah, man and boy simultaneously. I really like the idea of a contract here.
Thanks for all your thoughts.