help me write my book

[Chimera]

throw a little swear word in here and there for affect!!!!

you been to Canada in your travels at all Philly? Specifically western Canada as the east doesn't really count!

Victoria is awesome once you get out of the tourist trap area.

[PhillyB]

I'd try to keep slang out when possible.

 

Also, I asked RE: Word because my preference is to mark up documents in it with comments and stuff.  I don't know Scrivener's capabilities in that regard.

 

is there any slang you guys are referring to in particular? examples would be very useful.

 

i will be processually editing profanity. most of this stuff i just write down in one sitting and then leave it and edit in actual phases rather than little bits at a time, as it helps with stylistic continuity.

 

what about minor swear words like "what the hell was i going to do?" is that palatable?

 

mav, scrivener has a notation capacity and my margins are chock full of "fix this poo" and "verify this" and "work on this part later" :D

 

lastly: no hawk i've only been to niagra falls, when i was eight. in my next trip i will travel to canada and come back and write a book about snowshoes and mooses

[Hawk]

you leave my mooses alone!!!!

 

come out west...spend some time in the rockies....there's a book in itself right there!

[Darth Biscuit]

Book for Hawk:

 

 

No One Cares about Canada.

 

The end.

[Hawk]

Book for Hawk:

 

 

No One Cares about Canada.

 

The end.

 

please write and publish that and get it on the top 100 list or something....the more of you Mericans that think that way, the less of you will come to visit and the better it will be!!!!!

[frash.exe]

“Yeah bro, get that treasure in Heaven!”

This Matt guy sounds like a usda choice chucklef*ck

[PhillyB]

This Matt guy sounds like a usda choice chucklef*ck

 

i'm not exaggerating even slightly. this guy was a treasure trove of shitheadedness

[The NFL Shield At Midfield]

i can relate easily to that part.  i roomed with a guy named brandon (we called him brondon) who was similar.  fratty-ish guy without a frat, etc.

 

it was three nerds (two CIS majors and a physics major) living with this shock top drinking golf visor wearing dudebro.

[PhillyB]

ok i need more input. huge thanks in advance to anyone contributing. biscuit, stirs, googoodan, cat, therumgone, bronn, mav, frash - you all gave most of the input throughout the first section so i would really appreciate it if you guys in particular would carry that critique over to this section. i owe you beer.

 

i'm six chapters past where i left off in here and i can't help but feel that the story is getting monotonous. i am debating cutting a large chunk out so i don't bore the reader. but that's where my lack of perspective comes in: it's difficult for me to tell if it's actually boring, or if i'm just over-thinking it. i know it's difficult to answer that without the context of the rest of the book, but just reading this chapter, would you guys say it's something that keeps your attention, or do you find yourself skimming or wishing something exciting would happen?

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

Bush Country

 

Thomas Ebersoll was a stout, barrel-chested man, the complexion of his salt-and-pepper hair placing him at around forty-five. German by birth, he moved to Australia with his wife in the 1970s and become a naturalized citizen.

 

He was my first boss. I had spent the better part of a week holed up in a hostel in Sydney, developing elaborately-constructed cover letters and resumes to send to the various contacts in my WWOOF manual. Overkill maybe, but I was inspired by two Brits in the hostel sitting next to me in the commons area on cell phones, calling up contacts on a list and gracelessly asking if the they were hiring. They rattled down page after page of contacts like this, bluntness met with one negative response after another.

 

I paid sixty bucks for that manual and intended to take my efforts more seriously. I customized my emails to the advertisement, tailoring the opening sentences to whatever information was given in the advertisement, and then describing myself, my background, and abilities. I went for broke on the hard worker sell.

 

My effort was met with overwhelming success. Too much success, in fact, because of the dozens of replies offering me gigs on the spot I could only choose one at a time. I hadn’t anticipated such a high return on investment, and spent an hour writing back to the majority of them that my schedule was full with current propositions, and that I would notify them if I became available.

 

I had settled on the first reply, which was from Thomas. And he had arranged to pick me up from a street corner in downtown Sydney in several days’ time.

 

Several days’ time passed and now we were headed for Newnes. Deep in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney by several hours, Newnes was only printed by cartographers as an afterthought, a tribute to its glory days as a turn-of-the-century coal mining town. It had been abandoned for ninety years.

 

“We will stop in Katoomba,” he announced as we wound up a steady grade into the haze of the rising terrain. “You will want to see the Three Sisters.”

 

The Three Sisters, as it turned out, was a massive rock formation, a feature of erosion, three pillars rising, layered and looking not unlike a crumbling African castle of mud brick, from an outcropping on the lip of an enormous canyon, stretching, like some gaping yawn, across the valley as far as the eye could see. This epic proportion was my first glimpse of Australia’s vast Wollemi Wilderness, a continentally massive chunk of uninhabited land good for nothing but the existence of wild creatures and ancient plants and unspoiled beauty. For Thomas it was home; for me it was an exodus from mine. For me it was an adventure.

 

A few kilometers past Katoomba the road flattened out into a plateau in the highlands, a region populated by more windmills than people, and more sheep than windmills, and, by my estimation, more cows than all three added together. We stopped briefly for groceries, and then drove onto a narrow dirt track that ambled for a ways along a river, and then lurched over gravelly hills impossible for anything other than a four-wheel-drive to navigate, and rolled, at last, into a pleasant acre of grass. “This is Newnes,” declared Thomas, his voice a mixture of pride and awe, as though, after all these years, he still found a sort of primitive joy in arriving.

 

I could see why. The hotel, a sight by itself, lay yet unnoticed by my eyes, which traveled over the soaring canyon walls that towered above our destination. I had never seen the Grand Canyon, but this had to be something like the view from the bottom. Late afternoon sunlight cast an amber glow on the surface of the cliffs, illuminating sparse shrubbery that defied gravity and their barren habitat by taking root in vertical crevices.

 

I took all this in, likely with a look similar to the one I had seen pass over Thomas’ face, only much more so. “You are at the bottom of the Wolgan Valley,” he said, pronouncing the W more like a V, in the manner that Germans do, with enough of a similarity to the English pronunciation to show both his proficiency and that he had not quite yet achieved mastery of it.

 

The hotel was the next object of my inspection and his explanation. It was old, a turn-of-the-century building that betrayed its age, in spite of fresh coats of pain, with original paneling, original window frames, and eaves distinctly hearkening from another era. The interior was similarly fashioned, with the principle focus an enormous bar and lounge.

 

“It is a work in progress,” Thomas explained. He waved his hand at the bar. “This is all new. The rooms are still under construction as well, so you will stay outside in the holiday cabins.” At this he led me outside, where a cluster of small huts stood on a slight rise overlooking the hotel. They were in plain sight of the road, but I had missed them entirely in my dumbfounded survey of the landscape.

“Everything here is solar-powered,” he continued, pointing at a black rectangle mounted onto a low wooden post, angled towards a clearing in the trees, up and out of the valley. It looked like an enormous piece of framed sandpaper.

 

A small cat materialized and rubbed up against my leg. I reached down and scratched its back. “How often do you have guests stay here?” I asked.

 

He shrugged. “It depends on the time of year. Now perhaps one or two every week.” The goal of the whole project, he told me, was to create an entirely self-sustaining property. I was to assist in the construction of a water tank.

 

I spent the night in one of the cabins, beautifully constructed of wooden planking and furnished inside with lacquer furniture and comfortable linens. I was resting comfortably, quite at home, when I noticed an enormous spider sitting outside the back window, its markings clearly identifying it as a brown recluse. I shivered instinctively. There were not many things in life that I could claim to be afraid of, but spiders were definitely one of them.

 

So much for a good night’s sleep.

 

***

 

I awoke early, having slept lightly, probably on account of the spider, and wolfed down a breakfast that I was more hungry for than I’d realized. “The earlier you go to work,” Thomas told me as I chugged my second glass of orange juice, “the sooner you can explore the wilderness.” I nodded. WWOOF guidelines stated that WWOOFers were contracted for no more than five hours a day, five days a week. This meant I could get started at eight and be done in time to devour a quick lunch and spend the rest of the day trekking.

 

“Can you drive a manual transmission?” he asked when I had finished.

 

It’d been a while, but I answered yes.

 

He nodded approvingly and led me around the back of the hotel. An old Suzuki utility vehicle, showing its age through layers of visible rust, was parked under a makeshift carport composed of salvaged scaffolding and a tarp. He fired the engine, no small effort on his part, and backed it up to a six-foot-long trailer that wasn’t much more than an oversized wagon. It was bright and pristine in condition, a stark contrast to the hulk it was then hitched to.

 

“We need mortar to build this tank,” Thomas explained. “I have all the bricks up on the hillside, and cement, but we need sand to mix with the cement. Your job is to get the sand.” He instructed me to drive past the hotel until the dirt road split off to the right, and immediately down into the river. “It’s shallow there,” he told me, “and all you have to do is get across the river, turn around, and load up the loose sand from that side, bring it across, and I’ll tell you where to take it from there.”

 

Easy enough.

 

I opened the passenger side door, hesitated, shut it, and climbed into the driver’s side. Steering wheels were on the right in Australia. This unnerved me a little. Driving wouldn’t be problem since there was no traffic to deal with, but shifting gears left-handed might prove difficult. I warily depressed the clutch and fired the ignition.

 

Shifting gears should have been the least of my concerns.

 

I bumped cheerfully down to the riverbank, finding no issue in working the gears. The clutch was still on the left, so I didn’t have to learn a new configuration. After rolling the ute (as Thomas called it) as close to the water’s edge as I could manage, I reversed and inched it backwards, up the incline, away from the river, at a creeping pace until the trailer shuddered back up on the road. With about twenty feet of clear space downhill in front of me, I threw it into first and mashed the gas.

 

The ute lurched forward, accelerating, and I slammed the stick into second as I hit the water. It bogged down as the tires hit deeper water, and then a little more when the trailer entered, but my momentum was enough and I burst up onto the opposite bank.

 

This is where my problems began.

 

The opposite bank was sharply inclined, and I made my first mistake by pulling to a halt too soon. I tried to accelerate up and over it, and found that the tires spun uselessly and loose sand. I backed up several feet and gave myself some momentum. It almost worked. I reached the crest of the hill, where it turned abruptly to the left, uphill again, and when I hit that patch, the steering wheel cranked as hard as I could manage, the just wheels spun.

 

Now perched at a steep angle on the incline, the ute obeyed gravity and began to slide slowly downwards even though I was standing on the brakes. Cursing the inflexibility of the laws of physics I floored it again, spraying great clouds of dust high into the cloudless Wollemi sky and doing absolutely nothing to help myself.

 

As my downward slide continued, I wrestled the steering wheel, which was another mistake, as my wheels, now aimed to the right, caused the front of the ute to sling suddenly to the left, and the trailer behind me to skid sideways. Like the closing of scissors the ute’s rear bumper and the side of the trailer met with a metallic crunch.

 

A glance in the mirror showed it had been pinched nearly flat against the right side of the ute. My descent had stopped, undoubtedly because the trailer, now under the strain of several tons of steel, was acting as my brake. Visions of it being crushed and my hitching a ride back to Katoomba flashed through my mind, and out of desperation I dealt the gas pedal another brutal stomp, and by some miracle the tires discovered a hidden foothold in the sand, and I strained over the hump, bearing at a different angle this time, so that I could turn around without attempting the second hill.

 

I did a one-eighty with surprisingly little difficulty and drove back down to the riverbank, facing the shore I had come from. Large deposits of sand lay in clusters right at the river’s edge, so I drove out into the shallows until the trailer’s tires were barely touching water and cranked back on the parking brake.

 

For a solid hour I shoveled loads of sands It was fine, soft stuff, a creamy color, mysteriously at odds with the drab rocks of the creek bed inches away. Finally done, I pulled off my shirt, wiped off the rivulets of sweat that invaded my face, and climbed back into the ute. I started it and put it in gear, and the engine roared and strained and it would not budge.

 

Gritting my teeth I put it in reverse and found I could back up several feet. Once again I put it in first and tried again, lunging forward this time, but then slowing, and then a huge plume of white smoke escaped from the hood as the ute ground to a halt in the middle of the river.

 

The cloud, ghostlike, lingered for a moment to laugh at my condition, and then dissipated in the breeze. I swung furiously at a mosquito and rolled up my pantlegs. And for the next ten minutes I proceeded to half of the fruits of my labor into a river that I now noticed came alarmingly high up on the ute’s bulbous tires.

 

Thomas appeared on a bicycle. I told him what had happened. He climbed in and started the engine, and I waited in suspense, worried that he have it across in five seconds and I would be found incompetent. My sigh of relief was probably audible when another acrid ghost slunk out from under the hood and the ute crept forward only for a few inches.

 

Eventually we got it out of the river with the trailer only a quarter full of sand. “The transmission is bad on this one,” Thomas surmised, examining the engine. “Drive this one to the worksite and we will empty it and use the other ute.”

 

The worksite was on top of a mountain.

 

I made it halfway up the rambling switchbacks before the ute would go no more. Growling obscenities again, I sat, much the same as I had the first time on the opposite riverbank, with the wheel cranked all the way to the left, aimed around an uphill turn, while the entire vehicle shook and groaned. I stopped, coughing through the haze that filled the cab.

 

There was no point in continuing this. I pulled the emergency brake back as far as I could physically manage, blocked the back tires up with a pair of rough gray rocks, and trekked back down the mountain in search of Thomas.

 

“It’s done for,” I told him.

 

It was out of gas. We refilled it with a gallon, and re-fired it, but the plume of smoke grew larger than ever before and it still would not budge. At this point we gave up, unhitched the trailer, and muscled it off the road and into a flat spot in the bush. I got back in the driver’s seat and drifted backwards down the mountain in neutral, which was exactly as nerve-wracking as it sounds on nonexistent brakes, and left the thing to die behind the Newnes Hotel.

 

The other ute was new and white and twice as large with a bed of its own. It roared up the hill like a champion dragged the stranded trailer the rest of the way to the worksite. I spent the rest of my work day back at the river, loading the truck with more sand and dumping it back at the site. By two o’ clock I was done and spent the day wandering the grounds immediately surrounding the Newnes Hotel.

 

The days passed quickly in the Wolgan Valley, and my labor, while taxing, was good, solid, earthy work and I enjoyed even the hardest parts of it. In his efforts to create a sustainable facility, Thomas had added a large tank to collect rainwater, but it was coming out of the taps heavily acidic, so we were constructing a brick-and-mortar tank below it that would filter the supply. We ran the water line into it, securing it inside and cementing it in place, and cemented another in place on the opposite side. At a later date Thomas would add a basic substance, probably a mixture of slate and lime.

 

My afternoons were filled with wanderings deep into the bush. On my fourth day there, having already crossed the river and browsed through the archeological remains of the coal factory – now a crumbled collection of low walls, lines in the ground, crushed foundation and some remarkably well-preserved brick furnaces – I finished early and decided to take on a more purposeful trek.

 

Thomas had mentioned the Glowworm Tunnel on my first day in Newnes. I brought it up again and he nodded vigorously, rifling through a folder of papers and producing a hand-drawn map. He told me to take a bottle of water, so I filled my canteen to the brim, and threw it into a pack with my journal, a snakebite kit, and a flashlight. When I returned he insisted on driving me to the starting point of the trail, as it was a good six or seven kilometers down the road.

 

“See you at dinner,” Thomas waved cheerfully, when we had arrived, and drove off in a cloud of dust. The sun was high in the sky. I had eaten right before we left, and estimated the time to be shortly before one. Light got low in the valley around eight, and dark by nine, so I had a good seven hours to trek, eight if absolutely necessary.

 

I crossed the river by hopping from stone to stone, and on the other side, began laboring up a set of switchbacks that offered spectacular views of the valley, but not much in the way of physical ease.

 

The trail followed the path of the old railway, laid a century earlier, ripped up for scrap when the town was abandoned. The rail traversed the narrow contours of a steep mountain. Blasting had been necessary to clear much of the way, and towering walls of vertical rock appeared frequently to my left, and on the other side of the path, steep drop-offs.

 

Grandeur notwithstanding I was beginning to be distracted by an irritable twist deep in my stomach that had started around the beginning of my trek and was getting steadily worse. I reflected on my lack of foresight in not using the bathroom before I left and ran through the options in my head. There really was only one.

 

Of course I hadn’t thought to bring toilet paper either, and the eucalyptus trees, tough as they were to survive rooted in solid rock and salty dust, produced leaves equally as scrappy. They were the consistency of stale tortilla chips and the only thing available. Experiments with them failed miserably, and in my prolonged, fallen-tree-bolstered squat I resorted to tearing blank pages out of my journal, hoping beyond all hope that some nice family on a day trip wouldn’t come gallivanting up the trail behind me.

 

Nobody came, and I let out a contented sigh and headed off several pounds lighter.

 

The trail slipped, suddenly, down into an gulch nearly invisible from the outside because of a dense hedge of undergrowth that appeared, at first glance, to be the end of the trail entirely. But I pushed into it, wishing at times for a machete, because it would help me clear the vegetation (but mostly because I would look badass doing it.)

 

When I finally broke through, clawing the last wall of branches from my face, I had entered another world. The temperature dropped by at least ten degrees, the humidity doubled, and I gaped at the Jurassic terra that swallowed me. A stream tumbled down next to the pathway, mingling with it, providing life for large green plants, all of them unrecognizable, distinctively ancient-looking, that exploding from the earth.

 

I crept forward, suddenly conscious of the scrape of my soles on the dirt, feeling something like an intruder to this timeless place, even though there was no visible animal life, and when I wrapped my arms around a thick gray tree trunk to maneuver a deeper portion of the creek that had swallowed the trail, I half expected it to lunge out of the ground, in reality the lower leg of a brontosaurus. Deadly raptors eyed me from behind sloping green leaves the size of dinner plates.

 

And there, on the other side of my primeval forest of mastodons and screaming pterodactyls, gaped an immense black hole, undoubtedly the gaping maw of some extinct carnivore, undiscovered by  paleontologists, preparing to devour me. It turned out to be the mouth of the tunnel, which was less dramatic, but with this old world as the setting who knew what was in there?

 

Stepping into the yawning blackness was an eerie experience by itself, utterly engulfing, and as it slowly curved inward, the light ceased to refract, and in a few minutes I was enveloped in the inkiest kind of blackness I had ever known, the unadulterated absence of light. I flicked on my torch (as the Australians refer to flashlights, a source of initial confusion for me) and used it to guide myself through the tunnel, over the rock-strewn floor, which doubled as a barely audible waterway.

 

When I finally stopped and turned off the light, I witnessed the most alien phenomenon of my life. As my eyes adjusted again to the pitch black, I began to see minuscule dots materialize from the void. Periwinkle blue, they appeared by the thousands, millions in the imagination, luminescent and otherworldly, so closely comparing to a starscape on a cloudless night that I nearly began searching for constellations.

 

Chills ran down my arms and spine. I turned the light back on and they instantly disappeared. I examined a portion of the damp wall with my flashlight and only after several minutes of peering closely at it was I able to make out a tiny worm-like form. I turned the light off and again plunged into the celestial world of extraterrestrial wonder.

 

I don’t know how long I stood there entirely transfixed by the sight before me, but when I finally exited the tunnel, squinting my eyes against the overwhelming brightness, I noticed that the sun was significantly lower in the sky than it had been at the beginning of my entrance.

 

With this in mind I stepped my pace, with little desire to find myself lost in the bush after dark. The trail meandered down the other side of the mountain, and eventually into a sparsely-treed flat covered in dried-out eucalyptus leaves that crunched noisily as I stepped.

Then the trail disappeared, at once, at the edge of a minor cliff, a sheer drop-off forty feet above the forest floor below. I had been looking down at my feet when I reached it, not noticing it (it was supremely well camouflaged, brown and green clifftop against green and brown everything else) until I glanced up at the last second, skidding to a halt several steps before I would have ambled off the precipice.

 

I couldn’t pick up the trail again, on either side of the cliff or at its bottom, so I blazed my own trail through the bush. This was not physically difficult, since the vegetation was light enough that I could simply step around the next tree to avoid it at any given point. During my abbreviated stint in the military, I was near the top of my class at land navigation, the only thing distinguished about my time in Officer Candidate School, and I clung to this as a logical reason that I would be equally successful at it now. But I was not the great wilderness explore I fancied myself, and without a map or compass or chart my only bearings were the direction of the sinking sun.

 

By chance I stopped to tie my flailing shoestrings and heard the distant sigh of water running over rocks. It came from a point ninety degrees to me left, west, in the direction of the sun, and I set off immediately for it, having traipsed ahead fruitlessly for the last hour fruitlessly. Five minutes later I was overlooking the Wolgan. Nailed it. After splashing a cupped hand full of cold water in my sweat-streaked face, I followed the shoreline in search of a spot to cross. Eventually I discovered a massive tree, some species other than a eucalyptus, which was rare, laying across the river and spanning the shores.

 

On the other side I found the dirt road and followed it for a number of kilometers until at last the Newnes Hotel lay before me, the golden sun tossing long shadows across the lawn and then slinking below the horizon.

 

What deep sleep I counted on that night for my efforts during the day was countered when Thomas moved to a different cabin for the night to make room for a family renting out the other one. This one was choked by spiders of all sizes and disposition, the majority being large and angry. It was too hot to sleep with a shirt on, and a half moment after turning out the light I felt little legs scuttling across my bare chest. My spastic lunge to flick the light back on sent them rushing back into hiding. This happened several times, and with growing desperation I realized my options were to wake up Thomas and sleep in the hotel or sleep with the lights on here and drain the property’s power reserve.

 

The worst thing that could happen, I finally decided, was that the spiders were deadly and I’d go to sleep and not wake up, and then I’d never know it. If I woke up in the morning then I’d have survived the worst Australia could throw at me.

 

It was a macabre logic but it comforted me, and I wrapped up tightly in a thing blanket and collapsed willingly into the open arms of oblivion.

 

[Darth Biscuit]

I like it Philly... certainly don't cut this part...

 

FYI I'm never going to Australia

 

Either this is a typo or Australia is hell...  (or both)

 

 

The hotel was the next object of my inspection and his explanation. It was old, a turn-of-the-century building that betrayed its age, in spite of fresh coats of pain

 

Then you started again with the spiders and fug that place.

 

 

My only nitpick is I don't think Brown Recluse's build webs out in daylight like that do they?

 

Needs a tad of editing, but I think you said that.

 

 

Your description of the hike and the tunnel were excellent.  I would def read this (minus the spiders of course).

[Bronn]

....I had settled on the first reply, which was from Thomas. And he had arranged to pick me up from a street corner in downtown Sydney in several days’ time.

Several days’ time passed and now we were headed for Newnes...

 

I felt like this was a little redundant for the transition.

 

I tried to accelerate up and over it, and found that the tires spun uselessly and loose sand.

 

 

I'm not sure about this, but I think you meany "in loose sand."

 

And for the next ten minutes I proceeded to half of the fruits of my labor into a river that I now noticed came alarmingly high up on the ute’s bulbous tires.

 

I think you left out a word here. Maybe you meant "pour half the fruits of my labor..." or something similar??

 

I told him what had happened. He climbed in and started the engine, and I waited in suspense, worried that he have it across in five seconds and I would be found incompetent.

 

I think you left out a "would" here. Or since you use "would" later in the sentence, maybe say "worried he'd have it..."

 

But I was not the great wilderness explore I fancied myself, and without a map or compass or chart my only bearings were the direction of the sinking sun.

 

I think it reads better as something like:

"Alas, I was not the great wilderness explorer I fancied myself as. Without a map, compass, or a chart, my only bearings were in the direction of the sinking sun."

 

Other than those things that stood out to me upon my first read (as well as Biscuit's "pain" catch,) I'd still only nitpick commas and tangents. I would probably leave the poop bit out, or either expand it a little further to make it an epic battle between your gut's resolve and the contents contained therein.

 

I'd also look into your Brown Recluse claim. It was likely along the lines of a Megadolomedes or at least a cousin or something.

 

Glad to be able to read it, though. Thanks again for sharing and I am always looking for more.

[Chimera]

I've been up for 22 hours now and tried to give this a read before going to bed finally. But something about hooking up to a trailer lost me; I scrolled down and saw dozens of paragraphs that follow. I will have to read those at another time.

Where I stopped seems to be a stark contrast to the first section you posted. I see this as a good thing because I was worried it would become an outlet to vent against the "checklefugs" in your life.

[PhillyB]

I've been up for 22 hours now and tried to give this a read before going to bed finally. But something about hooking up to a trailer lost me; I scrolled down and saw dozens of paragraphs that follow. I will have to read those at another time.

Where I stopped seems to be a stark contrast to the first section you posted. I see this as a good thing because I was worried it would become an outlet to vent against the "checklefugs" in your life.

 

that's the part that i'm worried is boring… i may have gone into excessive detail. if you read it again when you're well rested and it's still making you skim, let me know.

 

those first couple chapters are the only part where i complain about chucklefugs, and that's just a device to foreground who i was and why i went. those original elements resolve quite nicely by the end and i think it's a redeeming work in that sense