*GASP* i totally thought i type gait aaaaaaaaaagh

What is the best way for a coconut to migrate?

I would say in a straight line, unless it wanted to stop and see some tourist attractions.

I guess my first comment would be that there are no images, and stories should have images. Images are the most important part of stories. The quickest way to next-level your writing is to write damn good images with the exact verb you need.

Images help narrative too, because it informs the reader on what the narrator prioritizes. As a third-person close narrative, you have someone eating their last meal, but all we know about it is that it's a diced up filet. We don't know what it looks like, how it tastes, what the plate looks like, where the juices are flowing (if any), how difficult it is to stab a cube of steak with a flimsy plastic fork, what the sides are, if someone's watching, etc. We also don't get any example alternative meals, even though you spend a paragraph writing about potential other meals. So you have this woman who's really focused on eating and meals and she's not even really looking at her meal or conjuring up other ones she could have ordered. It's just about disappointment, but disappointment without specifics is bland. "Was delicious," for example, literally has no flavor to it.

"All of the possibilities had been snuffed out the moment she had made her choice." ~ referencing something specific without elaborating later isn't usually a good idea. I get that she killed someone/did something to deserve the death penalty, and is about to die as a result of her choice, but if we're not going to know it in the story we don't need to hear about it. It's not like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, which was a vehicle for plot, this is just an aside. The story is about eating and dying, not why she got there, so we don't need to even wonder about it.

"...every bite of the filet mignon she chewed up and swallowed felt like an irreplaceable loss." ~ This is good. You could focus on this as a start to creating a list of other meals, other losses. It brings the conceit into focus more, the "last meal," while also creating tension for what happens next.

"It had no doubt grazed contentedly on its last leaves of grass..." ~ usually when writers say "it had no doubt" they're veiling the fact that they don't know what they're talking about or, alternatively, they're employing absurdism as a way to hyper-focus on how doubtful something is. I don't think this is absurd, so it seems like the former. And it's in passive voice too! I just think this is a missed opportunity. I'd like to see her imagining the cow in the grass and then letting that image dissolve into the cow's slaughter since it parallels the subject's inevitable demise.

"To struggle and be subdued would serve only to annihilate her illusion of agency." ~ this language is pompous as all hell, but I like it. It's probably my favorite sentence of the piece.

"It was time for her to go meet the cow." CATO.

"Then, she wasn't." ~ So I generally don't like stories where the point of the story is to be like, ha-ha the entire time you didn't even KNOW she was in jail/was an orange/was vacationing in a Dune worm's mouth! It's basically an unfunny punchline, and makes the reader realize the piece was plotless because the "point" of the story is the big reveal at the end. It's using obfuscation to seem original. The more interesting stuff is the guts of the piece--like, at first I thought this was going to be about an old woman at the end of her life who couldn't use a knife because her hands were so shaky or something. Instead it's like, OK, last meal, fate, die. Part of writing involves focusing not on just what you want to write but in the act of creation itself, of inventing something new for yourself or the world. This to me seems more like a narrative exercise in the delay of information. As an experiment it worked, because the focus on food/fate created conflict, but it needs more images in execution and, honestly, the stuff in the middle was just better than the end.

Overall it was pretty good though. Sometimes I come across as really critical, but if I hated it I wouldn't have said anything, so don't be discouraged.

If you want an example of someone using a delay of information, as a result of something unknown (a "choice") that employs a lot of consecutive images, tension-building adjectives ("sad hands" and "tender chin"), and a beautiful use of simile, check out Ritsos:

The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child’s fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn’t look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup’s handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It’s too late now. Let’s drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

Also, great verbs:

"buried in the old armchair"
"his hand... trembles..."
"throwing light..."

And then how he moves from the third-person to the plural first, inverting and internalizing a scene that is about watching two people internalizing. So good. The poem is called "Miniature" btw. Also, if you find yourself writing in short-form like this, I recommend reading prose poets like Russell Edson, Charles Simic's "The World Doesn't End," Claudia Rankine, etc.

I give the best advice.

Write every day. It's actually really hard to do. I fail most weeks.

As for the writing of yours I've read on your instagram, it reads sorta like pop-culture Joshua Clover. Your writing "defies" expectation because they're poems that aren't structured or written like poems, even though they're very clearly poems; often the "epiphany" at the end isn't something insightful but rather banal or a comment on banality; or sometimes your writing does both of these things which is how it "ignores" entirely the "this is a poem i am reading a poem" approach most have when reading poetry. I like that you play with that expectation, but at the moment it seems like that's a deep as it gets: you're only playing.

That's what I mean by saying you should give voice to something readers can't articulate unto themselves. For example, there's this poem about grief and loss and this woman dealing with her father's death. But the poem doesn't describe the death, or the anticipation of it, or the mourning of it, because that's a) really sentimental and b) really hard to do. It cuts to the center of the topic by describing a woman smelling her dead father's shirt from his dirty laundry right before she washes it. Like, she is annihilating the final physical scrap of her dad from the planet--the non-interred part anyway. I'm not saying you have to be that deep and heavy, but at some point you have to move beyond play to be read seriously.

Either that or you have to start cartooning.

The "choice" I was talking about was her choice to eat steak, not her choice to do whatever got her locked up on death row.

I don't get what you mean by "delaying information". I mean, I didn't really try to hide that she would die in the end.

Good points about using imagery.

Does "CATO." mean "good job" or "don't do this"?

It means don't do this. That line doesn't make sense by itself, and adds an element of humor/absurdity that wants to be gallows humor but really isn't bc it's so weird.

I guess I saw "choice" as the bigger "why I am here eating this and about to die" and not "I chose steak and I'm about to die," but that was a simple misread (my fault) that could be prevented just by being more specific about the alternatives to the choice. Still a decent bit of advice to keep in mind for other writing.

"All of the possibilities had been snuffed out the moment she had made her choice" becomes the crux of the story then. Like, ask yourself how different the story would be if it ended:

"She looked down at her now empty plate. It was time for her to go. She heard the click of the guard's key in the lock."

Same story, right? The stuff about fate is whatever, because everyone wonders about fate/death, whereas the nuance of the story seems to be about food and eating. Like, how screwed up is a last meal anyway? You're going to die, do you really need sustenance? That's good gallows humor.

Anyway, you delayed letting the reader know that she was in prison, something that's important to the story that could be solved by describing her cell. We don't really know she's on death row until the 4th paragraph of your 5-paragraph story. That's delay, whether you want it to be or not.

I guess that explains why your instagram stuff reads like they're not really serious. Some of them are pretty good though--read Clover and see what I mean.

What is the overall purpose of punctuation, and why don't people realize that the Oxford Comma is necessary in order to convey actual intonation patterns?

I think I just answered my first question. In an advice thread. I'm so bad at this.

Currently the Oxford comma sees more meaning in its use than its intentions of intonation. To me, at least. Like if I read a journalist using Oxford commas I'm going to assume they're foreign, pretentious, or English majors and not that they're mimicking the oral pauses of litanies.

Also I wouldn't say O-commas are used solely for patterns of intonation.

Oxford commas? Ooh don't get me started. But seriously I refuse to get started on the subject. All I'll say is that I'm not a fan.

So you decided to jabber on about commas while not addressing the real question.

What is the overall purpose of punctuation?

Here are two sentences:

There are three horses running tonight whose names are Fire and Water, Thunder and Lightning, and Fire and Ice.

There are three horses running tonight whose names are Fire and Water, Thunder and Lightning and Fire and Ice.

In the second sentence, there are only two horses running and the second one has an absurdly stupid name with too many "and"s. O-Comma wins.

****, that was three sentences (plus a fragment). Epic fail (because I hate fragments and because "Epic fail" is my second fragment which nullifies my earlier assessment of a single fragment and I just want to quit typing but I can't).

Yeah. There were more than two sentences.

Oxford Commas always win in the end. They are like cats that way.

What parts of the site should I visit?

I would say punctuation creates order, much in the way rhythm does in music. There's meaning to it as well, like m-dashes usually mean interruption or asides or you're reading Emily Dickinson.

Your example doesn't quite work as you say it does, because it implies there are three horses without the O-comma because we're still dealing with proper nouns. The potential names would be:

Fire and Water
Thunder
Lightning and Fire and Ice
Thunder and Lightning
Fire and Ice
Thunder and Lightning and Fire
Ice

However proper nouns are really never so formulaic and almost never have 'and' in them, which is the real culprit here, because it's used in the list and within the proper nouns. And anyway because less is more, the best way to write that would probably be:

There are three horses running tonight: Fire and Water, Thunder and Lightning, Fire and Ice.

If you're a magic player you should keep an eye on the Spoiler Room and Magic General. If you go to tournaments the Constructed Forum and Limited Forum are there for deckbuilding assistance. It's not as noisy as some other boards, and there are some good players here.

The play-by-post forum is nice if you want to kill time in small increments. We have a lot of savvy gamers here, and there is an especially nefarious and interesting mafia group here.

This off topic room is alright too. Really, you should poke around and find what it is you like about the space, and then make it your own.