>"Likewise. The blade should be clean and so should our blood."

What the god damn hell is this trying to say? That if you sleep with anyone without a condom (say, to have a child?) that makes your blood impure? Or is he trying to say that anal sex without a condom makes your blood impure because of HIV? I just? What is going on?? What is even trying to be said?

>Kamchatka didn't understand what this was about, but he wanted to know.

At least I’m not the only one.

>Kamchatka again obeyed and then fled the dripping thumb pressed into his own.

I have no idea what “fled” is supposed to convey.

>He looked down at it and then looked up at Stetchkin's eyes.

Unexpectedly homoerotic.

>I am not sure what to do with the paperwork about our fallen comrade.

When did we start talking about a fallen comrade? Once again I feel like something was just sprung on me with no explanation whatsoever. Remember what I said about transitions? Use them, please, god.

>Handmade revolvers and machine pis

>What is this trying to say? That the tea has some sort of agent in it that calms their emotions or strips them away or something so they don’t go crazy because they’re cops who’ve seen too much?

It's caffeinated. If they drink too much they'll become scared and anxious. So, they water it down and pace themselves.

[https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/478675070253006869/933756385810874458/unknown.png](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/478675070253006869/933756385810874458/unknown.png)

“Kamchatka”'s point of view is that if someone looks tired and worn out, empty, they look like a Russian. This tells us what he thinks about Russians and what their lot in life is.

\>Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I know what an automaticis, under folding stock, night vision shit and silencer. But seriously,why should I care?

You know what all of this is, and you don't recognize the most common and plentiful firearm right now? The AK?

You should care, because maybe its stran

>At the moment the tea was weak, so they could drink more of it and not completely lose their minds. Despite how tired they often were and the shifts that never failed to last exactly half a day at least, it was too dangerous and uncomfortable to be excited or scared.

What is this trying to say? That the tea has some sort of agent in it that calms their emotions or strips them away or something so they don’t go crazy because they’re cops who’ve seen too much? And I’m supposed to believe that Drug Tea is somehow less expensive that coffee, after the tirade I sat through in the opening paragraph about how no one can afford coffee and the POV character hates it? What on earth is going on here?

>It was a face that seemed to indicate that the detektiv had been qualified for his position for at least a few years before the collapse.

Still not following what’s going on here. Are you trying to say that this detective was a detective before the Soviet Union collapsed? I mean, sure, but is th

I think my advice is going to boil down to this:
You really, really need to proofread your stories. You also badly need to read more books and look at the way information is laid out in them. Nothing about this story earns any degree of deviation from the norm. People don’t put “K” in front of text to indicate who’s speaking, they use speech tags and beats. Words don’t get bolded or underlined out of nowhere in fiction. A chapter shouldn’t exist without a scrap of information on where the characters are. I get the distinct feeling you rush your work and submit first drafts here. That’s not going to help you and it’s leaving me frustrated. Write a chapter, edit it, proofread it, and edit it some more. Make sure you have at least 1-2 weeks in between the first draft and the one you want to submit. Critiquing a first draft is *super* frustrating!

I feel like I shouldn't informed you ahead of time that you can ask questions, if something small and fixable is confusing.

So for example, I've had thoughts of making all swears and curses, bold. It might be too distracting, so I wasn't sure, but swears are distracting, that is the point in verbal language. I could also use different fonts. I thought about using a

So and so thought that was some strong language

But as far as I know, swearing is very common in Russian, especially if people are having a hard time (Criminals, poor, law enforcement, conscripts)

You put so much work into this, and some of this could've been fixed beforehand.

**Currently tired, shouldn't read your thing now as I need to take a nap. I'll get back to you later.**

EDIT: I tried to heavily imply that the viewpoint character of chapter one is being talked about in chapter 2. This implies this happened in the path.

I had thoughts about having the chapter start with "Two weeks later", but I've been reading 

Hello,

Every time I read through this, I literally cannot figure out what I just read. I would have given you a review sooner than this but I’ve needed to overcome the urge to skip this one; to be honest, I’ve already read your passage, so I might as well type up my thoughts.

**OPENING THOUGHTS**

In the nicest way possible, this feels like literary gibberish and I am not understanding a single bit of it. Having read and done a dive into your first chapter, I expected a continuation of Iosef’s story when I originally opened this thread. Even after reading it a few times, I still have NO idea what you are trying to convey to the reader, or even how this is supposed to sit into the framework of the whole story. Maybe I’m not a knowledgeable enough reader for this one—I don’t know a lot about Russia or its politics—but I feel as if I’m banging my head into a wall trying to understand what I just read. As a reader, this is frustrating. It’s not fun like the previous chapter was and it fe

>cyka

сука is not the same thing as "cyka". Write "suka" instead next time :)

I think there is a major disconnect from what I am writing and how it is being interpreted.

Let’s do a deep dive on the tea paragraph:

> He was right. At the moment the tea was weak, so they could drink more of it and not completely lose their minds. Despite how tired they often were and the shifts that never failed to last exactly half a day at least, it was too dangerous and uncomfortable to be excited or scared.

So a strong black tea is about 75 mg of caffeine. A strong cup of coffee is 150-200 mg of caffeine. Some bro’s preworkout powder mix is about 200 mg per serving and some of them will do multiple servings of preworkouts at once. Weak tea is something from my experience that seems like something a soldier-police used to stakeouts could drink non-stop. Hell, from personal subjective place half the cocaine, tren/clen (steroids/hormone modulators) users I know used to be in an armed forces. Many of them would “balance” stuff out with blood thinners and beta-blockers plus weed 

>Okay. K again. Talking but in italics? Is this being broadcasted?

I need to write down that if something is in italics, it's an expression in Russia. 

>For some inexplicable reason I read Onisim here as Onanism or masturbation/the Bible dude who spilled his seed on the ground.

God damnit, it's a Russian name... I looked it up and as far as I know, it's not short for anything.

>Is this tea or psychedelic shroom tea? What happened with all the talk about coffee before?

Why does no one understand that if you shoot up with caffeine you go insane? I explain they are tired afterward, and then I describe symptoms of taking too much caffeine.

Do people not know tea is caffeinated or do they just not have a lot of caffeine? 

>I got seriously lost here because of how this seems written about in a generalized sense, but does not seem right given the specific set up AND this is the first real clues about the setting. I have not felt cold in this scenario as of yet

You're right, but you're

Continued...

> K"Everything the...true."

Okay. K again. Talking but in italics? Is this being broadcasted?

> Onisim looked up and saw that Stechkin was nodding. 

For some inexplicable reason I read Onisim here as Onanism or masturbation/the Bible dude who spilled his seed on the ground. 

> The joke had … funny again.

This moment here between the two should have been funny. It should have read with a bit of that cold, pickled beet leftover snark, but instead because of all the build up being a hard to follow laundry list of digressions, I just ignored it.

> "And here … our operations."

Okay. SO it seems to not even matter who said this or who the ‘’’he’ latter is, but my gut tells me this is not OR, but probably K or Stech…

He said or He grumbled. Dialogue tags are a hot topic and can be done different ways. However, they need to be done in a manner the reader can follow. Something in this style of piece is not making it clear who is talking so the absence of any tag is a styli

>Thank you for posting. For the record, I am writing this for a few reasons and wish you read my response with a certain openness to your self that may be painful.

Oh God, I should've taken this down before I lift the house.

>your response to them (although not defensive and genuine

Too defensive, there is too much evidence that the problem is not a lack of education in the reader. 

>Overall As a reader for fun (not academic/institutional), I have read a number of difficult authors who are known for dense prose.

This is a concerning datapoint, clearly my writing is too difficult. 

>Okay. Why is Turks not funkified like Americans?

Because it would be harder to understand what the word was, without knowing Russian? Because I had no expectations of bringing up Turks ever again after this chapter? That was my thought process.

>Seems odd. Why is “Like a newborn” which seems to be an internal thought of OR’s in quotations and not italics. Is he speaking out loud about the situation a

Thank you for posting. For the record, I am writing this for a few reasons and wish you read my response with a certain openness to your self that may be painful.

1) A lot of your writing seems very much like how a lot of my writing started before asking others for feedback who were not family, lovers, pet rocks. If your point is to share your work with others, then the audience should be a specific concern

2) u/Cy-Fur has provided you excellent feedback that really hits a number of problematic spots and your response to them (although not defensive and genuine) reads as if the focus is not quite right (eg instead of noting x or y as an issue, the response seemed to place the onus on the reader to make a greater effort as opposed to the text being more accessible).

3) Ideas are easy. Writing things is easy. Editing is a beast with spring-loaded venomous fangs erupting out of some gigantic lamprey like forever open maw. This reads as if it was not edited for clarity. 

4) I got reall

[https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s6bhdg/1887\_lunar\_orbit/ht4trho/](https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s6bhdg/1887_lunar_orbit/ht4trho/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s2rybu/1152\_solace\_in\_code/htak60p/](https://old.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s2rybu/1152_solace_in_code/htak60p/)

I have surplus words in case I make edits, because of anyone feedback. This is assuming my feedback is any good and thus has any kind of value.

\&gt;Please see advice from previous chapter.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s60adm/2734\_darkness\_drudgery\_and\_death/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/s60adm/2734_darkness_drudgery_and_death/)

The last two days have been trying to get better at critiquing, reading books about this time period, setting, and police; and stuff like that. School work too.

Reading a lot of advice that says to "write write write".

What are your thoughts so far for the alternating structure for chapters?

EDIT:

~~Link is purged for your own safety~~

Events that are not important, might be decided by rolling dice. The characters just have to adapt, it;'s not guaranteed things go a certain way.

[2201] D III, Chapter 2