Claire_D's profile

Claire_D avatar
AGE: 30
LOC: United Kingdom
GEN: Female
LAST LOGIN: October 06

Urbis is a place where manqué writers swim with the professional cash-seekers of the publishing world, in search of a lowly scrap of appreciation, and where those aspirational souls of the doomed printed presses commingle for the largest masturbation contest in the West.

Welcome.

DO: Leave thorough critiques and helpful, specific advice.

DON’T: Leave 50-word dribble and end with the phrase ‘I would love to read more’.

I write thorough critiques since these are the kind most people appreciate and seldom leave.

I am one of the Urbis elite. Do not mess with me.

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Items
Short Story / When We Gently Call the Worms
Version 6
8 Reviews   19 Comments
Sometimes, when Linda is strapped for cash, she ties a rope around her chest, walks into a toilet, inspects the stalls for loiterers, hurls a noose over the door and says: “Move it, worthless.” I met her in March when she lassoed Jericho, a former husband of mine, from the men’s room in the Dunstable multiplex during a matinee screening of In The Cut. We had been married for seven months, and in that time, he had developed a penchant for masturbating in public urinals whenev...
Ratings & Rankings
Short Story / A Simple Child
Version 2
23 Reviews   29 Comments
This is the tale of a simple child. A child without malice, a child without judgement. A child without cruelty, a child without vice. A child without lust, a child without sin. A child whose capacity to sweat has left him, as he approaches his seventeenth birthday, a spitting, drooling, slavering, octopus-like infrahuman sub-squid, leaking rivers of sweat from his prodigious pores. Our tale begins in the winter of 1987, when the V-necked sweater was at the height of its popularity. Born in th...
Ratings & Rankings
 Plus-button Clarity
Journal, Diary, & Blogging / Corporate Bookshops
Version 1
12 Reviews   20 Comments
A dolorous man, in the sagging swansong of his life, stands hunched over the canon of Dean Koontz with a look of semi-perverse disgust. A crinoline mugwump with satchel eyes and Weltschmerz lips scrutinises the oeuvre of Martin Amis with marked contempt. A bun-headed student in an acrylic sweater funnels ten-pound notes into the till and passes occasional comments on the richness of detail in Kazuo Ishiguro’s early work. I stand before the classics shelf, agog at the £12.99 price tag on a min...
Ratings & Rankings
Short Story / More Tipsy Than Litzvah
Version 1
18 Reviews   28 Comments
The more welcome the dawn, the more welcome the day. It was to the strains of late 1980s indie-pop outfit Adult Net that inveterate Obscurist and Curio Collector Fitz McPatrick arose from his squalid sleeping quarters in drowsy Dumfriesshire. In his realm, the idea was to conduct a life divorced from commercial tedium and explore hidden pleasures removed from the mainstream. This meant a forced love affair with pease pudding. It meant he spent hours indoors in summer watching re-runs of unsuc...
Ratings & Rankings
Short Story / Around The Eyes
Version 1
18 Reviews   36 Comments
Whenever Donna Dram De Fauna, local sex receptacle and town doormat, walks through a room, whether a bedroom, the lavatory of a local beef restaurant or the vacant art museum at the stuffy end of town, one has the strongest urge to close one’s eyes at once and conceal one’s face from probable harm. A common phenomenon around here. Let me make clear the problems of her ghastly character and the strange eye-camouflage outburst that has developed. Born before the drug shortage of the late 1990s,...
Ratings & Rankings
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Reviews
Novel Treatments / Critique on an opening
by Anonymous
Electric opening sentence. Reads like a perfect blurb tailor-made to rope in the reader from all walks of life. I would have a space after the ellipsis and the final part of the sentence, however. That niggled me a little. However… this establishes the predicament of the protagonist in a philosophical manner. Top notch. The next sentence I am less mad about. I think the sentence should be flipped around, beginning with Joyce instead of the position of her hands. Once we know her name, then we...
100.0% Review Quality (3 Votes)
Short Story / The Tragedy at Memorial Bloom Hospital
by Curtastrophe
Possession, aggression, depression, repression. I think these four (handily rhythmic) words best sum up this complex, mind-boggling psychological rendezvous with otherworldly inhabitation, seedy underground intrigue, old-fashioned spook story and eerily demented plot-screwer. The ideas, and they way they are related, creates in the prose a very spasmodically appealing story. Despite the apparently sound guidance of the narrator, what transpires at the hospital cavorts with defying all explana...
Quotes / Role Reversal
by Blue_Eyes
A writer after my own heart. This line declares firmly that the power of the imagination is far greater than other media, and I still adhere to this. How dizzingly creative, endlessly inventive and brilliantly transformative can we be in any other medium than the written word? Wisdom flows from your pen. Keep it up. Claire
Haiku/Senryu / The Spiders Descend
by Blue_Eyes
Brilliantly emotive haiku. Although the tone is bleak, it delivers a rousing message for us to take action, while acknowledging the grim fact it might be too late to make a difference. The bouncy alliterative 'W' sound is perfect for the haiku. The word 'WAR' explodes from your tongue as you are reciting it. Great assonance here also. Almost a perfect example of this poetic technique that I would point poetry learners too (were I in any position of responsibility whatsoever). Although this is...
100.0% Review Quality (2 Votes)
Poetry / 11th Day of Summer's End
by jebozid
To review this, I am accessing the vaults of my poor recollection of divine pinkish poetry. Ah… there it is, behind those sublime guidelines I read yesterday. Not poetry, but… ya know. Points to (maybe) help: Not sure why the hyphen is there in ‘surprise breakfast’ but I’m assuming it’s a stylistic nuance. I think the phrase however, looks grammatically wonky like this. ‘I tease how’ = to have two ‘yous’ here would be repetitive, but this leapt out at me as off. I think since the first stanza...
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