The Energy Room

I found 'The Energy Room' through Kickstarter, came here out of curiosity and honestly? What you have here isn't ready for that kind of exposure. There are some interesting ideas in this work but the framework they have been set in isn't really worthy of them. Specifically, while the concept of the Energy Room itself - a space where people who have never (and would never?) met can interact in their dreams - is a fascinating one, it's being let down by generic, thinly-drawn characters and a somewhat clichéd plot.

First off, this story seems to fall into the fairly common trap of portraying a teenager with superpowers as serially suffering and just misunderstood, end of story, with all the people who think she might pose a threat being at best misguided, actively malicious at worst. The problem is that though Angie is correct to think she's being treated unfairly, the people who are afraid of what she represents are correct as well. Your heroine is a teenage girl who could level a city simply by thinking about it and if she was left alone and unsupervised all an average human could do about it would be hope she never decided she wanted to. She genuinely is a threat to people without superpowers, and a serious threat at that. Deciding she needs to be watched is not an overreaction. You're writing about a situation that is rife with ambiguities and grey areas: how does Angie's need for freedom and self-determination square with the right of the people around her not to be maimed or killed if she loses control? This isn't - or shouldn't be - a black-and-white case whereby Angie is 100% right and the people who want her restrained are 100% wrong.

I would go so far as to say the heroine was overpowered, though this may well be a matter of personal opinion. All the same, there doesn't appear to be any reason why 'elemental' control should also lead to her having healing abilities. You've also stated the only power she isn't totally competent with is ice formation - and even that stops being an issue no more than three chapters in. Where is there for this character to go? I would suggest scaling back her powers, at least at this stage, simply to stop them breaking the narrative. A character who is this competent this early on isn't going to have much scope to grow and change, and therefore isn't going to have much of a character arc. Aside from escaping the facility, what challenges is Angie going to be confronting? What is there for her to overcome? Conflict drives plots, but your heroine can already do pretty much anything she wants. The only hurdle she needs to get over is 'taking off her restraints' and just perhaps 'picking a boy', and for a protagonist that's really not enough.

Don't be afraid to give Angie flaws - and a flaw is only a flaw if people react to the character as if she's flawed. You mention that Angie is a compulsive liar and, from the fact it's mentioned in her subject files, you suggest everyone who knows her knows it. The problem is that nobody ever treats her as if she was one (they don't mistrust her, they don't point out she has a habit of trying to lie her way out of trouble, she's never the girl who cried wolf) so to all intents and purposes she might as well never have lied in her life. Why does Eric believe her when she ducks a difficult question by claiming there's someone she's in love with? More to the point, why do his parents believe her? Angie is a liar, they know she's a liar - they're just not treating her like one, because... why? Compulsive lying is not an appealing trait and, while it won't stop people caring for her, they sure as Hell won't stop hating the sin. Right now the only person who thinks any differently of Angie for her behavior is Angie herself, and the only consequence of it is she's now super good at telling when other people are lying. This isn't a character flaw, it's an informed attribute.

Simply, if all of a character's problems are external and would no longer be an issue if only the world were less cruel, they can come off as flat, inhuman and unsympathetic. Six chapters in and I still don't know much more about this girl than 'she's special and troubled so she must be interesting to read about', 'she's a manipulative liar but it's totally not her fault' and 'all the other sympathetic characters totally love her'. As a central character, she never really comes to life. She's mostly just kind of there.

Al doesn't really stand out as a character either: he's brilliant, charismatic, secretive and possibly dangerous, with special powers and beautiful and startling eyes, and the heroine has to decide whether or not she can trust him even as she wrestles with her own feelings for him. He's Edward Cullen as a psychologist - the comparison, I'm afraid, is frankly unavoidable - while Eric is Jacob Black right down to being younger than the heroine and an also-ran from the start. What does Eric have going for him when he's not obsessing over Angie? He's a non-character who seemingly exists solely to love the heroine desperately and cause problems her and her crush because he's just so jealous, though there's also no explanation for why he's so infatuated with her - because she's there? - or why she feels the need to make such a production number of only seeing him as a friend. He just does and she just doesn't. It reads as little more than 'here's the romantic conflict'... only not, since Angie's taken such pains to point out, over and over and over again, that she isn't remotely interested. Love triangles only really work if the possibility exists that the apex genuinely could choose either point. Otherwise it's just conflict for conflict's sake.

Outside of the main characters, most of the rest of the cast are flat, Angie-obsessed ciphers. While Angie may only see them when they interact with her, these characters need to have things in their life that bear no relation to her whatsoever if they're going to have a hope of appearing like fully rounded individuals and not just walk-ons in your heroine's life. What do they do when Angie's not there? What do they talk about when she's not present? Finally, they simply don't convince as grown adults. No matter how much they may like her, an eighteen-year-old girl's love life should not be exciting to two married professionals in their forties that they'd drop everything, work included, to discuss it the minute she turns her back.

What exactly is the purpose of the facility? Right now William and his staff appear to be experimenting on Angie because she's there and they can. There simply doesn't seem to be any reason for it but a reason, even if only hinted at, is exactly what the people running the program need - otherwise why are they doing it at all? Most people involved in dubious enterprises have rationalized their actions and believe they're acting for the best, and the staff experimenting on Angie should be no exception - they shouldn't be doing it just because or, worse, just because they're evil. The reason could be more or less anything (they could want to make a weapon of her, they could want to replicate her powers, they could simply want to keep her confined) but they should have some idea what they're doing all this for and so, even if only by implication, should the audience. Right now I have no idea why the heroine is held at the facility save that she's special, thus important. That makes sense, but it still doesn't explain what they hope to get out of this. The single experiment Angie participates in doesn't clarify anything, but seems designed to showcase how powerful she is. The staff aren't recording anything save her vital signs, there's no control group or second subject, and the only criteria for success would seem to be 'is there ice?'. Nobody's expecting a treatise on the scientific method from a work of fiction, but showcasing Angie's powers for the audience's benefit and that's it does not an experiment make.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in this story as it stands, something that could and should be corrected by thorough proofreading. On several occasions your narrator will state something seemingly as fact only to contradict it a few paragraphs later, and it's left me at least rather confused on a number of points. For instance:

+ The heroine describes Pam, a worker on the breakfast shift, as 'one of her favorite chefs'. Yet she says she seldom if ever shows her face before eleven AM (only by her own standards does 7:45am count as 'the crack of dawn' - a lot of people are up and doing by then and a dining hall serving breakfast would be about at its busiest) and doesn't usually go to the food court. She also states that the vast majority of the staff in the center work four-hour shifts. How did she even meet Pam?

+ The facility the characters contains several living areas for staff and their families, described as analogous to small towns. We later find out there is only one boy onsite close to the heroine's age. If there are enough families onsite to populate several small towns, how come absolutely none of them have sons in their late teens?

+ How old is Nadia? The heroine states she's the same ages as her right down to the day and she's described in a manner that would seem to make her a late-teen or young adult character (the description of her voice is, at the very least, not appropriate for a child). We're informed Nadia has been comatose for three years, yet later that scene Angie states that Nadia's coma was caused by a car accident when she was four. This should make her seven years old at most.

+ What exactly is going on in the facility? I presume Angie is not the only person being held there simply because the place, as described, is vast - too large, too well-funded and too heavily-staffed for a single subject. If, on the other hand, it has been set up specifically to research people like Angie, how come they don't know where any of the others are?

+ When Eddie and his team test the heroine's ice-making capabilities the test involves a large tank of water, yet it's later stated the most she's managed before is cooling a drink. If Angie hadn't suddenly developed the ability to create entire ice palaces they'd have risked not noticing what effect she'd had on the water because there was simply too much of it. Given her track record in the area they're testing surely the team would be thinking a lot smaller - for the sake of getting an observable result if nothing else?

But the wider problem, and most serious inconsistency, is the schizophrenic nature of the setting. You really need to make a decision about what Angie's world is like and then stick to it. At present the heroine is barely more a captive than kids like Eric are: they didn't choose their situation either and won't, if this institution really is that secret, be getting out into the world any more than she is. She's free to stay up late, to sleep in, to form relationships, to wander largely unsupervised, to pay visits to her friends - and she's friends with most of the characters who've been introduced. This would work if the intention was to portray her as a happy slave who believed the outside world was dangerous and co-operated with the tests because she believed she was helping, but she holds the facility and its ambitions for her in contempt. It's odder that the staff adore her back despite her status as genuinely dangerous test subject. People are simply too lenient toward Angie, and too pleased to see her, for her (so far intermittent) attacks of disdain and dissatisfaction to make any real sense.

Either the facility is little more than a prison or it isn't. If it's supposed to be then Angie simply has too much freedom - she can choose her diet, set her own schedule, express herself, roam the facility, form attachments: the average high-school senior has more restrictions and responsibilities than this - and she needs to treat the staff in general and William in particular as if they were genuinely threatening and not just minor irritants she's too cool to acknowledge. If the heroine is just a test subject the staff should be discouraged from treating her like anything but, and certainly forbidden to socialize with her. If she isn't, she needs to stop acting like she is. This also raises the issue that the facility would seem to be quite literally all Angie knows. If she's never had freedom, why would she miss it so much? Might it not make more sense if Angie had been raised from childhood to believe that the facility was the best place for her, and her conversations in the Energy Room and sessions with Al gradually led her to start questioning this?

Angie seems curiously detached from her surroundings: while this can be a worthwhile character trait it comes at the cost of making her seem disinterested and, coming from a first-person narrator, this can cause problems with tone. As readers take their cues on how to react to a situation from the characters in it, continued disinterest can lead to the world itself seeming uninteresting and, more problematically, to supposedly threatening characters appearing unmenacing. The heroine simply doesn't seem bothered enough about William: her attitude to him is contemptuous if anything, and that's going to leave some readers wondering why, when Angie doesn't appear oppressed, he's supposed to be such an oppressive presence in her life. Having her refer familiarly to him, by his forename, only adds to this impression. William is not a threatening name. Calling him, say, Professor Harris would work better. Better still would be to refer to him by title or position: 'The Director is angry' sounds a lot more ominous than 'William is angry'.

That the only foreign character - who the hero and heroine mock for his foreignness - is also the only character clearly identified as villainous also has rather unfortunate implications. If the intention is simply to make William sound cultured or stuffy, it might work better to describe him as such without specifically coding the character as British. Suggesting that British people are worthy of mockery simply for sounding British is something I, as an English reader, found a little offputting.

Finally, I can't really tell why this story needs the 'Energy Room' concept and using it to bring together characters who are all very similar - all exactly the same age, all tragically orphaned, all super-powered - honestly seems a bit of a waste of an intriguing concept that could have been used to forge links, and find common ground, between people whose lives and experiences were otherwise extremely different. Tying entry to youth and special powers simply seems a rather limited way to approach a concept that would appear to have no limits at all. The energy room and the people who inhabit it could be a story in its own right - no love triangles or special powers needed.

I can tell that you're really excited about this story, but as it stands it's simply not ready for crowdfunding. I would suggest that you need to flesh out the characters and the world they move in, fix the distracting internal inconsistencies and read up on a couple of the disciplines you've mentioned - at least about psychology and what scientists are looking for when they run experiments - before you take this to a paying audience. Again, you don't need graduate-level research here. You just need to be familiar enough with the concepts that you can write about them with confidence.

Please don't think I'm telling you to stop writing altogether: I'm not. I just really don't hold with the fact you're asking other people to pay for such a flawed project to see print. Kickstarter is many things and self-publication has its place, but neither is a replacement for honing your craft and paying your dues. There's nothing the matter with writing first (or second, or third, or fourth) stories like this. Everyone has to start somewhere, everyone needs to practice, and I'm all for writing simply because you enjoy it. That doesn't mean, though, that what you've produced is ready for publication: while I genuinely think this idea has promise, it is in its current form riddled with clichés and inconsistencies and needs a lot more refinement if it's going to fulfill it. I know this sounds harsh and if I've upset you I'm sorry, but once the issue of other people's money comes into play - and $2,700 is not chickenfeed - you lose a lot of the slack an enthusiastic young author might otherwise be cut.

Posted 11 Years Ago

I found 'The Energy Room' through Kickstarter, came here out of curiosity and honestly? What you have here isn't ready for that kind of exposure. There are some interesting ideas in this work but the framework they have been set in isn't really worthy of them. Specifically, while the concept of the Energy Room itself - a space where people who have never (and would never?) met can interact in their dreams - is a fascinating one, it's being let down by generic, thinly-drawn characters and a somewhat clichéd plot.

First off, this story seems to fall into the fairly common trap of portraying a teenager with superpowers as serially suffering and just misunderstood, end of story, with all the people who think she might pose a threat being at best misguided, actively malicious at worst. The problem is that though Angie is correct to think she's being treated unfairly, the people who are afraid of what she represents are correct as well. Your heroine is a teenage girl who could level a city simply by thinking about it and if she was left alone and unsupervised all an average human could do about it would be hope she never decided she wanted to. She genuinely is a threat to people without superpowers, and a serious threat at that. Deciding she needs to be watched is not an overreaction. You're writing about a situation that is rife with ambiguities and grey areas: how does Angie's need for freedom and self-determination square with the right of the people around her not to be maimed or killed if she loses control? This isn't - or shouldn't be - a black-and-white case whereby Angie is 100% right and the people who want her restrained are 100% wrong.

I would go so far as to say the heroine was overpowered, though this may well be a matter of personal opinion. All the same, there doesn't appear to be any reason why 'elemental' control should also lead to her having healing abilities. You've also stated the only power she isn't totally competent with is ice formation - and even that stops being an issue no more than three chapters in. Where is there for this character to go? I would suggest scaling back her powers, at least at this stage, simply to stop them breaking the narrative. A character who is this competent this early on isn't going to have much scope to grow and change, and therefore isn't going to have much of a character arc. Aside from escaping the facility, what challenges is Angie going to be confronting? What is there for her to overcome? Conflict drives plots, but your heroine can already do pretty much anything she wants. The only hurdle she needs to get over is 'taking off her restraints' and just perhaps 'picking a boy', and for a protagonist that's really not enough.

Don't be afraid to give Angie flaws - and a flaw is only a flaw if people react to the character as if she's flawed. You mention that Angie is a compulsive liar and, from the fact it's mentioned in her subject files, you suggest everyone who knows her knows it. The problem is that nobody ever treats her as if she was one (they don't mistrust her, they don't point out she has a habit of trying to lie her way out of trouble, she's never the girl who cried wolf) so to all intents and purposes she might as well never have lied in her life. Why does Eric believe her when she ducks a difficult question by claiming there's someone she's in love with? More to the point, why do his parents believe her? Angie is a liar, they know she's a liar - they're just not treating her like one, because... why? Compulsive lying is not an appealing trait and, while it won't stop people caring for her, they sure as Hell won't stop hating the sin. Right now the only person who thinks any differently of Angie for her behavior is Angie herself, and the only consequence of it is she's now super good at telling when other people are lying. This isn't a character flaw, it's an informed attribute.

Simply, if all of a character's problems are external and would no longer be an issue if only the world were less cruel, they can come off as flat, inhuman and unsympathetic. Six chapters in and I still don't know much more about this girl than 'she's special and troubled so she must be interesting to read about', 'she's a manipulative liar but it's totally not her fault' and 'all the other sympathetic characters totally love her'. As a central character, she never really comes to life. She's mostly just kind of there.

Al doesn't really stand out as a character either: he's brilliant, charismatic, secretive and possibly dangerous, with special powers and beautiful and startling eyes, and the heroine has to decide whether or not she can trust him even as she wrestles with her own feelings for him. He's Edward Cullen as a psychologist - the comparison, I'm afraid, is frankly unavoidable - while Eric is Jacob Black right down to being younger than the heroine and an also-ran from the start. What does Eric have going for him when he's not obsessing over Angie? He's a non-character who seemingly exists solely to love the heroine desperately and cause problems her and her crush because he's just so jealous, though there's also no explanation for why he's so infatuated with her - because she's there? - or why she feels the need to make such a production number of only seeing him as a friend. He just does and she just doesn't. It reads as little more than 'here's the romantic conflict'... only not, since Angie's taken such pains to point out, over and over and over again, that she isn't remotely interested. Love triangles only really work if the possibility exists that the apex genuinely could choose either point. Otherwise it's just conflict for conflict's sake.

Outside of the main characters, most of the rest of the cast are flat, Angie-obsessed ciphers. While Angie may only see them when they interact with her, these characters need to have things in their life that bear no relation to her whatsoever if they're going to have a hope of appearing like fully rounded individuals and not just walk-ons in your heroine's life. What do they do when Angie's not there? What do they talk about when she's not present? Finally, they simply don't convince as grown adults. No matter how much they may like her, an eighteen-year-old girl's love life should not be exciting to two married professionals in their forties that they'd drop everything, work included, to discuss it the minute she turns her back.

What exactly is the purpose of the facility? Right now William and his staff appear to be experimenting on Angie because she's there and they can. There simply doesn't seem to be any reason for it but a reason, even if only hinted at, is exactly what the people running the program need - otherwise why are they doing it at all? Most people involved in dubious enterprises have rationalized their actions and believe they're acting for the best, and the staff experimenting on Angie should be no exception - they shouldn't be doing it just because or, worse, just because they're evil. The reason could be more or less anything (they could want to make a weapon of her, they could want to replicate her powers, they could simply want to keep her confined) but they should have some idea what they're doing all this for and so, even if only by implication, should the audience. Right now I have no idea why the heroine is held at the facility save that she's special, thus important. That makes sense, but it still doesn't explain what they hope to get out of this. The single experiment Angie participates in doesn't clarify anything, but seems designed to showcase how powerful she is. The staff aren't recording anything save her vital signs, there's no control group or second subject, and the only criteria for success would seem to be 'is there ice?'. Nobody's expecting a treatise on the scientific method from a work of fiction, but showcasing Angie's powers for the audience's benefit and that's it does not an experiment make.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in this story as it stands, something that could and should be corrected by thorough proofreading. On several occasions your narrator will state something seemingly as fact only to contradict it a few paragraphs later, and it's left me at least rather confused on a number of points. For instance:

+ The heroine describes Pam, a worker on the breakfast shift, as 'one of her favorite chefs'. Yet she says she seldom if ever shows her face before eleven AM (only by her own standards does 7:45am count as 'the crack of dawn' - a lot of people are up and doing by then and a dining hall serving breakfast would be about at its busiest) and doesn't usually go to the food court. She also states that the vast majority of the staff in the center work four-hour shifts. How did she even meet Pam?

+ The facility the characters contains several living areas for staff and their families, described as analogous to small towns. We later find out there is only one boy onsite close to the heroine's age. If there are enough families onsite to populate several small towns, how come absolutely none of them have sons in their late teens?

+ How old is Nadia? The heroine states she's the same ages as her right down to the day and she's described in a manner that would seem to make her a late-teen or young adult character (the description of her voice is, at the very least, not appropriate for a child). We're informed Nadia has been comatose for three years, yet later that scene Angie states that Nadia's coma was caused by a car accident when she was four. This should make her seven years old at most.

+ What exactly is going on in the facility? I presume Angie is not the only person being held there simply because the place, as described, is vast - too large, too well-funded and too heavily-staffed for a single subject. If, on the other hand, it has been set up specifically to research people like Angie, how come they don't know where any of the others are?

+ When Eddie and his team test the heroine's ice-making capabilities the test involves a large tank of water, yet it's later stated the most she's managed before is cooling a drink. If Angie hadn't suddenly developed the ability to create entire ice palaces they'd have risked not noticing what effect she'd had on the water because there was simply too much of it. Given her track record in the area they're testing surely the team would be thinking a lot smaller - for the sake of getting an observable result if nothing else?

But the wider problem, and most serious inconsistency, is the schizophrenic nature of the setting. You really need to make a decision about what Angie's world is like and then stick to it. At present the heroine is barely more a captive than kids like Eric are: they didn't choose their situation either and won't, if this institution really is that secret, be getting out into the world any more than she is. She's free to stay up late, to sleep in, to form relationships, to wander largely unsupervised, to pay visits to her friends - and she's friends with most of the characters who've been introduced. This would work if the intention was to portray her as a happy slave who believed the outside world was dangerous and co-operated with the tests because she believed she was helping, but she holds the facility and its ambitions for her in contempt. It's odder that the staff adore her back despite her status as genuinely dangerous test subject. People are simply too lenient toward Angie, and too pleased to see her, for her (so far intermittent) attacks of disdain and dissatisfaction to make any real sense.

Either the facility is little more than a prison or it isn't. If it's supposed to be then Angie simply has too much freedom - she can choose her diet, set her own schedule, express herself, roam the facility, form attachments: the average high-school senior has more restrictions and responsibilities than this - and she needs to treat the staff in general and William in particular as if they were genuinely threatening and not just minor irritants she's too cool to acknowledge. If the heroine is just a test subject the staff should be discouraged from treating her like anything but, and certainly forbidden to socialize with her. If she isn't, she needs to stop acting like she is. This also raises the issue that the facility would seem to be quite literally all Angie knows. If she's never had freedom, why would she miss it so much? Might it not make more sense if Angie had been raised from childhood to believe that the facility was the best place for her, and her conversations in the Energy Room and sessions with Al gradually led her to start questioning this?

Angie seems curiously detached from her surroundings: while this can be a worthwhile character trait it comes at the cost of making her seem disinterested and, coming from a first-person narrator, this can cause problems with tone. As readers take their cues on how to react to a situation from the characters in it, continued disinterest can lead to the world itself seeming uninteresting and, more problematically, to supposedly threatening characters appearing unmenacing. The heroine simply doesn't seem bothered enough about William: her attitude to him is contemptuous if anything, and that's going to leave some readers wondering why, when Angie doesn't appear oppressed, he's supposed to be such an oppressive presence in her life. Having her refer familiarly to him, by his forename, only adds to this impression. William is not a threatening name. Calling him, say, Professor Harris would work better. Better still would be to refer to him by title or position: 'The Director is angry' sounds a lot more ominous than 'William is angry'.

That the only foreign character - who the hero and heroine mock for his foreignness - is also the only character clearly identified as villainous also has rather unfortunate implications. If the intention is simply to make William sound cultured or stuffy, it might work better to describe him as such without specifically coding the character as British. Suggesting that British people are worthy of mockery simply for sounding British is something I, as an English reader, found a little offputting.

Finally, I can't really tell why this story needs the 'Energy Room' concept and using it to bring together characters who are all very similar - all exactly the same age, all tragically orphaned, all super-powered - honestly seems a bit of a waste of an intriguing concept that could have been used to forge links, and find common ground, between people whose lives and experiences were otherwise extremely different. Tying entry to youth and special powers simply seems a rather limited way to approach a concept that would appear to have no limits at all. The energy room and the people who inhabit it could be a story in its own right - no love triangles or special powers needed.

I can tell that you're really excited about this story, but as it stands it's simply not ready for crowdfunding. I would suggest that you need to flesh out the characters and the world they move in, fix the distracting internal inconsistencies and read up on a couple of the disciplines you've mentioned - at least about psychology and what scientists are looking for when they run experiments - before you take this to a paying audience. Again, you don't need graduate-level research here. You just need to be familiar enough with the concepts that you can write about them with confidence.

Please don't think I'm telling you to stop writing altogether: I'm not. I just really don't hold with the fact you're asking other people to pay for such a flawed project to see print. Kickstarter is many things and self-publication has its place, but neither is a replacement for honing your craft and paying your dues. There's nothing the matter with writing first (or second, or third, or fourth) stories like this. Everyone has to start somewhere, everyone needs to practice, and I'm all for writing simply because you enjoy it. That doesn't mean, though, that what you've produced is ready for publication: while I genuinely think this idea has promise, it is in its current form riddled with clichés and inconsistencies and needs a lot more refinement if it's going to fulfill it. I know this sounds harsh and if I've upset you I'm sorry, but once the issue of other people's money comes into play - and $2,700 is not chickenfeed - you lose a lot of the slack an enthusiastic young author might otherwise be cut.

Posted 11 Years Ago

After reading what you have posted thus far.... Wow, Fascinating, Smooth in it's delivery, Nice flow and change ups in the story line. Wonderful characters and outflow and interactions of their personalities. Not many storys catch my mind and keep me going these days, but this one did. Kudos ! An amazing story you've got evolving here. One I would certainly buy the book and see the movie! =D

Great Ink!
Aaron

Posted 11 Years Ago

This is very good work, Styna. I want to see more...

Posted 11 Years Ago

Nice.. Keep it up.. Do u read mine 2 "ANGUISH" If possible then gives ur review..tc

Posted 11 Years Ago