Response to Jeremy Hare

                I think that the story is about a character named Sora, a boy who had a bit of a rough childhood with some of the other kids in school. At some point during the time he was bullied he met a guy that was capatain of the karate team, Ryu, and refused to help Sora with his problems. However, Ryu promised Sora that the day he could beat Ryu that he would teach Sora how to defend himself as well as to be the strongest in the club. The overall feel of the story seems to be never give up no matter how many people tell you that you can’t do something. He even has the co-captain Hikara telling him to give up because she thinks that Sora will never be able to beat the captain, but no matter what, every day Sora keeps trying.

                I thought it was a good idea for a short story and I liked what seemed to me to be the overall theme of the piece. I also like the fact that it was very original because I have never really read a story like this before. There wasn’t much detail about Karate in the story which I found to be a good thing because most people have a general understanding of what Karate involves, so sifting through all the explanations I feel like would have made the story hard to read, so good job on that. Also, you threw in the internal thought in the paper well. A lot of new writers don’t really know how to write internal thoughts, so that fact that you knew to add those in italics was definitely a plus because other people who put asides in quotes make it difficult to understand if a person is actually speaking or if they are just saying something to themselves. I also liked very mush how you ended the story.

                A few ideas that I might suggest for this piece is maybe to develop Sora and Hyu’s relationship a little bit further. I would have liked to hear a little bit more about the background of the two and what happened for them to make this promise. I understood the general point but I would have like to have gotten more about it. There also seems to be a few places where you repeat words a lot which is really no big deal, just something to think about.  The main thing about this piece is that I just want more. Overall though, I think you had a very original idea and I liked it.

Dialouge

I listened to my roommate and one of her friends.

Rhegis: "What do you want to do this weekend?"

Amanda: "It doesn't matter to me. I think my best friend is coming into town though so you will finally get to meet her."

Rhegis: "Aww yay."

Amanda: "Yeah, we can all go out for drinks or something."

Rhegis: "That sounds good to me.  I need a drink after this week."

Amanda: "Oh yeah, how is your internship going? Are the kids nice?"

Rhegis: "Yeah, most of them are nice. All of them are like really country though."

Amanda: "Have you taught a lesson yet?"

Rhegis: "Yeah, my cooperating teacher is pretty old so I think he is fine with me teaching a lot."

Amanda: "What do you mean old? Like how old?"

Rhegis: "Probably late 60's to early 70's."

Amanda: "Damn, I'd be retired if I were him."

Rhegis: "Um, hell yeah."

Amanda: "At least you are getting a lot of experience."

Rhegis: " Yeah, I would so much rather be teaching, or anything else besides sitting there and observing. That makes the day go by so slow."

Amanda: "I'm sure, I could not sit there all day long and listen to the teacher. It would be like going back to high school all over again."

Rhegis: "Well, I'll be in a high school for a long time."

Amanda: "But at least you get to be on the other side this time, not a student. Maybe it will be better that way."

Response to 1-900

            This particular story was intriguing as well as a little creepy. A man, who seems to be extremely lonely calls into a phone sex line, however he doesn’t really seem to have an interest in participating in the phone sex until he has gotten to know the girl on the line. As the two continue to talk about very personal matters, the girl on the line seems to get a little freaked out by this mystery man who is telling very personal things about himself as well as trying to learn personal things about the young woman on the line.

            I definitely thought the story was interesting, and it kept me reading because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen exactly. A lot of times in stories you get to hear the characters speaking as well as what is going on inside of their heads. I liked the fact that we didn’t really know what the characters were thinking. We got clues throughout the dialogue as to how they felt, however it never right out said what they man and were actually feeling. At some points you start to think that the girl, Marilyn/Sharon will start opening up to John. As soon as she shares a detail though, she begins to shut down again.

            At first I thought the story was simply about a lonely man who misses his wife and kids, and genuinely doesn’t feel like he can talk to anyone. I began to change my mind about his intentions towards the end of the story though. After Sharon shares a few personal things about her life, including the fact that her boyfriend doesn’t tell her he loves her, John begins to tell her he loves her. While I found the fact that a man would be calling a phone sex line just to talk creepy in the first place, I really began to get a bad feeling about John once he started saying I love you. We never really find out what John’s intentions are, whether he really just wants someone to talk to or if he has some other perverted or sick motive.  In the end Sharon hangs up, and we are left trying to figure out what John was really up to.

Emergency Response

     If I'm being completely honest, I'm not exactly sure what that story was about. At first I thought it was just about to guys who worked in the ER and got messed up on drugs. I thought maybe it would follow some of the crazy things they did and then just sort of end, but the ending threw me for a loop. After they picked up the little boy after going back to work and Georgie told him he saved lives I kind of lost what I thought the story was about.
     I really liked the opening of the story. Talking about working in the ER and then finding a friend mopping up blood, it caught my attention well. I also like the part about Terrence coming in with the knife in his eye. I became a little confused when Georgie had the knif in his hand and then everything seemed to be fine with Terrence for the most part. The dialogue in the story really kept me interested. The narrator and Georgie have such a crazy and interesting relationship that even though at some parts it is confusing, it still keeps you entertained. For instance, talking about camping out, keeping the babies warm, the drive in, it's all just so unexpected that you want to figure out what the two are talking about so you keep reading.
     As I said before, some parts of the story confused me a little bit. The ending was confusing because of the fact that Georgie said he saved people's lives. He did pull the knife out of Terrence's eye, but that could have gone either way. He also cut the bunnies from the mom's stomach, but all of them ended up dying. I guess the main thing is I'm wondering if most of the story is skewed from the pills they have been taking. Also, the narrator begins talking about which time he is remembering specifically, or if he can even remember correctly when his story happened. It sort of made me think that he was still doing drugs or even maybe that he quit and because of the fact that he had been high at the time then he couldn’t remember his story exactly. I liked parts of the story, but as a whole it really just confused me, but maybe it was supposed to do that.

Short-Short: Prank Calls

           They had done it so many times before, every time they had sleepovers really. Sara’s parents had gone out to dinner so the three decided to have a little fun. Hannah, Amanda, and Sara were infamous for prank calling, but this time it had gone too far. As they sat huddled in the closet, one holding a phone, one a pen, and one a stiletto as make-shift weapons, they wondered how an innocent prank had turned into a horror film. All they had wanted to do was mess around with someone and they had obviously picked the wrong person to mess around with.

He had said he’d traced the call and was watching them from the back yard at that exact moment. Just as those words came out of his mouth there was a loud bang on the window. The girls all screamed, grabbed the closest thing that could be used as a weapon, and ran to hide behind the clothes in the closet.

After about five minutes of hiding Sara felt like they were all being stupid so she convinced the other two that they should walk out and have a look around. Once they made their way up the stairs and into the back hallway they saw that the bathroom door was shut and that the light was on inside. They tried the door planning on surprising the intruder hiding behind it, but it was locked. All three immediately said that they were not responsible. After they looked at each other and realized that someone had been in the house, they ran back downstairs and straight into the closest.

About the time they had settled into the closet they began to hear footsteps upstairs, and it sounded like they were headed for the stairs. After moments of holding their breath they began to hear the descending sounds of feet on the wooden stairs. They waited, for what seemed like forever, for the man on the phone to open the door and turn them into the town’s newest horror story, but the door never opened. Then they heard it, their names were being called. For a moment all they could do was focus on the sheer terror running through their bodies as they realized the man knew their real names, but then the familiar voice spoke again and they realized it was just Sara’s father. They all burst into simultaneous laughter as they realized what drama queens they actually were.

After telling Sara’s parents their story, and finding out it was Sara’s mom who had accidentally closed the bathroom door while the lock was still turned, they felt like idiots. That night they decided they would never prank call anyone again because their prank could just as easily be turned around on them.

Response to Television

Television seemed to be a story about how a family uses TV in order to sort of escape from their day to day lives. After a long day at work, or wherever, they all come home to watch specific shows that are exciting, or they watch the news with people that they find attractive, basically anything to keep them entertained. The main character seems to be tired of dealing with her own life at the end of the day, therefore she turns to the television so that she doesn't have to think about her life, even though it could be a movie or a show of its own.
The writer's structure of the story was interesting, it was numbered in a way in which the narrator gives three different examples of what kinds of different things her and her family watch. She describes each of the shows and their reactions to the shows in great detail, which is something I feel like I need to pay specific attention to because I feel like I get lost in telling my stories and don't give the reader enough detail. For example, she talks about how her husband pays special attention to the news so that he can catch a glance at the young reporter's breasts. This makes the story easier to relate to because most women knows what it feels like to have a man check out another woman right in front of her. It also adds a little bit of humor to the story because of the fact that it is so realistic. I also thought her descriptions of the sort of soap operas were funny. The particular part that was witty was when she is talking about the son who comes back and marries his father's wife, then she clarifies in parenthesis that the woman he marries is not his mother. This is also interesting and wittybecause we have all seen those trashy shows that are so hard to keep up with because the drama is so ridiculous. Basically the thing I can learn most from this story is the writer's attention to detail and how she makes that detail easy for the audience to relate to.