HBO Fan Fiction

[hboff]

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Limbs
Posted by Harbringer352 (Harbringer352)
1 January 2013, 7:09 am

http://halosn.bungie.org/fanfic/?story=Harbringer350101130709331.html

[eb4642]

Harb, you know I'm a sucker for anything involving AIs and Rampancy, so I do like this.

Just a few niggles:

• You re-use the idiom of emotions "flooding her data banks" or "filling her systems" a couple of times.
  
• Adverbs! "Anxiously, Cortana began to run primary diagnostics..." comes across as a little bit clumsy. You might like to try re-phrasing it, for instance: "Detecting a tingle of her own anxiety, Cortana started the primary diagnostics..."
  
• This is a really, really minor bugbear: you're using hyphens where you should be using em-dashes. Hyphens are used to join words, such as 'blast-door'; dashes are used to join clauses of a sentence together—just like that. You can generate them using shift+alt+hyphen on OS X. If you're on iOS or Android, you can usually generate them by holding the '-' key and choosing it from the resulting pop-up.

That aside, you did a very good job of getting inside Cortana's rampant 'head': her thought processes are frantic, disjointed, and yet have some degree of rationality to them. You've also remembered her capture and interrogation by the Gravemind, which is something many seem to forget.
_________________
The Elitist Bastard | Writing is the business of professional turd-polishing.
"(don't take this review too seriously) If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??"

[Harbringer352]

Thank you for the tips! I've been without proper critiques for a while, so this will really help me shape up.