[2018] Heartless: Chapter 2 (Part 1 of 2)

Yup - you thought you were rid of me.

You thought wrong.

For those with the fortune to have avoided me thus far, this book I'm working on is called Heartless. It's a fantasy-parody romcom. My goal is to take simple fairy tale tropes/concepts and satirize them by importing a very modern context. I try to give a range of different styles of humor, but there is definitely a reliance on absurdity. Think "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" meets this.

This is Chapter 2. In Chapter 1, my goal was to introduce Zeb. This Chapter is about introducing Felix.

I'm playing a bit with the timeline - I started out a year into their faked rivalry with Zeb. The beginning of Chapter 2 starts back at their first encounter, and the second half (not in this crit document) will then bring us back to when Zeb steps out in his fancy outfit for the first time, but from Felix's perspective.

Leave it to me to make the meet-cute as complicated as possible.

So please let me know if this is too confusing and I'm better off moving some of these sections around to create a more straightforward timeline, or some other way of handling it.

That's my only specific crit request - otherwise, tear me apart. That's when my writing seems to improve the most.

I'll never stop abusing commas though, sorry.

Lastly, it's been really interesting seeing how some people will love a certain joke while others hate it. I do want your opinions on my humor, but just know that I am relying on absurdity at times (like holy hand grenades or knights that won't concede even after all their limbs are chopped off), so keep that in mind. I am in no way suggesting that you must like my humor, and I do greatly appreciate it when people tell me certain things don't land - but it would also help me if the crits take into account 'type of humor' and not just personal taste. Although this section is fairly muted as far as 'absurdity' goes.

Here's Chapter 2.

I'm happy with comments on the doc or Reddit, but if you comment on the doc, please do me a favor and highlight only the punctuation at the end of the sentence when commenting on something in that sentence to try and keep it as readable for as many people as possible. Also please avoid trying to make direct edits in the text - I will reject them outright to keep the document readable.

If you're curious to see how I edited Chapter 1, or you want to read it for context, you can see a view-only doc here. DO NOT CRIT THIS. It is not part of my crit request and it's only in here for context, if you feel you want/need it. I think quite honestly you can probably go into Chapter 2 without having read Chapter 1 and do fine.

Speaking of crits:

2385

3232

Thanks, and happy destruction!