A lot of this is wonderful, thank you! Especially the comments about setting -- there are definitely lot of little details I could reposition that would help fill in some of the blank canvas space. 

The name bit was something I intentionally picked *because* it was so common. Angus is pretty vulnerable right now, not quite all there anymore, and aware that he's missing something. I'd tried to think of a stupid insult he might feel sensitive about -- and I figured *angus derangus* was an easy rhyme that might have been made on the playground. People unanimously disliked that, though, so the mark was missed. There are lots of other ways to invest the word count, thankfully :) 

Thanks again\~

**GENERAL IMPRESSION**

Started off charming, meandered into an overused phrase or two and slightly-off similes, and finished with a cool ending I didn't see coming but probably should have. I feel like I caught wind of a specific narrative voice at times, but it wasn't consistent in the middle and fell off at the end, replaced by lines of dialogue and short actions.

I had to look up "Clarence Odbody". If there's a second meaning to it besides its concrete tie-in to the story, I might just be too young to understand it. 

**HOOK**

> Angus sat at a still-strange table, considering the cup of black coffee in front of him. 

I think this works well enough as a first sentence hook. Why's the table strange? I do think "unfamiliar" might work better. "Strange" might refer to its shape, texture, size, etc. "Unfamiliar" better conveys the sense he likely has that he's out of place. 

> Angus pursed his lips, doing his best to convince himself that he hadn’t heard anything. 

This was the sec

Ehh, I asked for it. 

I have my master draft of the story, then whenever I share it here or with a beta reader, I make a copy of the file (and share the copy). That keeps my main draft (with all the half-assed thoughts, quotes that spoke to me, problems I think need resolved, etc) separate from all the feedback I get from others (which I may keep or ignore). The feedback I find useful I comment into my master draft to think about later. 

So it's cool :P

The comments/suggestions for this submission are exactly why I keep things read-only. DJ PS? More like DJ BS.

Just hopping in to say that some of the line edits on the doc are *questionable*. Will fire up a full crit some time later this week; your insight on my previous submission was much appreciated.

Thanks for this\~

The memory issues and people-interactions definitely need to  be reworked.

I've got two main goals:

1. Communicate that Angus is in the habit of meeting new people that he "should already know" 
2. Make it clear that he doesn't recognize Angus Jr

I think an important thing that's not being achieved is for the conclusion to provide insight into Angus Jr's feelings (and thus Angus' current situation). My wife's grandma always mistook my wife as being my wife's mother (the grandmother's daughter), and as scary I'm sure all this was for the grandma, it was also really painful to my wife to deal with the fact that the most significant/shaping figure in my wife's life no longer knew who she was.

I tried to hint to that frustration in the beginning - the coffee doesn't tell Angus that he's slow or get frustrated with him - then tried to communicate Angus Jr's frustration by having him ring the doorbell several times... but those interactions can be made stronger/more si

I gave some line edits. So, here are your ABCs:

\# Awesome

This is a sad story. It's great to see a sympathetic image of the internal struggle of dementia. If you could put a little more 'pathetic' in sympathetic, (not in the looking down our nose at him kinda way) but a little more struggle and confusion with his predicament would complete the image for me. 

You have a few charming details that distract him. The table is still-strange, the stucko ceiling, strange and sudden noises, maybe the eggs or coffee. Pick some really clear elements that signify the different emotions (confusion, anxiety, hyperfocus/wonder, etc) to deliver on that 

The uneasiness about the noises, his broken train of thought and the paragraph formatting all add to this uneasiness of someone's faculties slowly leaving them. 

&#x200B;

\# Boring

I didn't feel particularly carried through this story, but I also don't think I needed to be. 

I also didn't like the part about name calling. I understand the func

Thanks for taking the time to read my story\~

>While it’s easy to imagine a stucco ceiling, I wish you would describe the surrounding area a bit more. Without more setting development, I just imagined my Grandpa's old kitchen. Instead I should be picturing what you want me too.

I think that this is a common theme amongst all the feedback. 

I'm working on figuring out how much I do and don't need to spell out for readers, and it looks like I need to give a few more explicit pushes if I want it to be obvious that Angus was recently (a week ago) sent to an assisted living facility. 

In Chuck's book, he also talks about how he thinks we should avoid "standardized measurements like inches and miles" because "the way a character describes the world should more accurately describe themselves." It's one of my weak points. There are a lot of ways I could re-do the middle to give a better sense of setting while simultaneously showing a bit more of Angus. 

>I also don’t understand the title 

Ok, so be aware that this is my first time critiquing somebody's work. 

**A**  
The A’s are easy. Angus is a great character. Though not completely unique, I nearly instantly liked him. Everyone knows an old, slow man even if it's just from T.V. Nearing the end of the story, I thought he could do with a bit more development. When I finished though, I realised that would have had a negative effect on the character due to the memory loss. The ending really made me feel that not a lot of stories this short can do. When it dawned on what was going on, it was like a punch in the gut. I love the bit with the eggs. Currently I’m reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This and he talks about how “Your body is a recording device more effective than your mind.” I feel like the egg’s touched on this simply and beautifully.    
  
  
**B**  
The start and ends were brilliant but they were let down by a very average middle. I feel like when you started to talk about stucco ceiling I started to dr

Gotcha, the just under 1k words is a common enough cut off, so I wondered if that was intentional.

Notes on dementia: there are a whole lot of subtypes of dementia, so I don’t have anything specific with regards to a great single resource. If I was going to guess, I have always sort of thought dementia with Lewy bodies/lbd would make for a good crux of a story. I guess here though it’s more about finding one symptom you want to highlight, and then working backwards to figure out what type of dementia the main character would need to have. Obviously it’s a spectrum, and often enough subtypes be coexist, but yeah, I’d choose one. Sorry if that’s a rambling non answer.

I appreciate your directness, as always\~ 

>Narrative distance yo-yos between very distant and close.

Initially, this was supposed to be a supernatural horror flick under the title *Man-Eating Cats*. Angus has been hearing things from upstairs, but everybody insists that it's nothing. As time goes on the noises become more pointed, saying progressively more antagonistic things. *Lock him in the bathroom and let him starve.* 

Eventually Angus works up the courage to go investigate -- because somebody has to do something -- but the room is empty. He steps inside. There is meowing coming from across the room. Upon opening the door to the bathroom, he's stricken across the back of the head, falls down, goes unconscious. Story ends. 

Around 300 words in the story pivoted in a different direction (this one) and I scribbled it out as fast as I could. Now Angus thinks he's the main character of two very different genred-stories, I've got no idea what to do with the text, and it just happen

So to recap:

The problems that I see in this piece in order of severity are as follows

Narrative distance yo-yos between very distant and close. This degrades the ability of the piece to create a unified voice and occasionally really surprises me as a reader and throws me out of the narrative.

The depiction of dementia felt a bit pulled from the 90s zeitgeist. I would love to see more granularity about how Angus experiences dementia and for this to veer closer to a specific type of dementia.

Pacing felt uneven. There were whole paragraphs I wondered could this be left out.

Qualifiers and filtering felt very prominent throughout this. Many of them felt intentional but the Multiplicity of them got to me.

Other quibbles as above.

On a Sentence level, all the writing felt competent, as usual. So well done! Not an easy thing to do. Fluff mittens was cute and angus was likeable!

Questions: why the word count as is? 
Who is the target audience?
Anything else I can do to help?

Heyooo.

Preface: voice to text at times. I think I’m in the middle of updating the size and magnitude of the skill gap between us. So this will probably be less fanboyish than prev.

Also: I can only copy the text as is, which includes comment markers, so hang onto ya hat.

The hardest thing to say:
So reflecting on this piece and the breakfast piece, I wonder if sometimes the use of tropes (thing of jazz there, dementia here) is a little more impressionistic than granular? For example: I left this wondering what sort of dementia angus derangus manangus potatangus plantangus has? Like is there a specific answer? 

Line by line or para by para now. Then end notes.

Angus sat at a still-strange table, [a][b]considering[c][d][e][f][g][h][i] the cup of black coffee in front of him.

-Meh. The only hook here is still-strange and I think it doesn’t have a clear meaning on a first read. Hook me this sentence does not.

He liked coffee.

-I’d roll this into the next sentence or cut it. 

It d

An old dude is trying to enjoy breakfast with his beloved cat, Fluffmittens, but he keeps getting interrupted. 

(The other day I discovered the concept of [Motivation-Reaction Units](https://writingcooperative.com/the-motivation-reaction-unit-cc765df74e8) and this is how that manifested.)

**Desired Critique**: I love line edits (just seeing how other people would approach a sentence is something I find super interesting), but aside from that, please give me the ABCs:

* What was awesome?
* What was boring? (Want to put the story down? Leave a comment at that sentence. Feeling a bit bored? Same deal.)
* What was confusing? (Good or bad confusing?)

**Critique**: [\[1352\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/qu6c6i/1352_how_things_catch_fire_beginning/hktli1v/?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3) (As an aside, I'm super proud of this critique. I think it's the most useful bit of insight I've ever stumbled into, so as writing goes.)

**Story**: [7 Vertical Clarence Odbody](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OgVYvrMp7pv9h-7xgJx7zPDMSPU8p2LgFaYk3K6hA-8/edit?usp=sharing)

[991] 7 Vertical Clarence Odbody