Proxy 

member since 08/27/2007 | last login 06/22/2012

I live in Northwestern Pennsylvania and currently hold a BS in physics and Psychology based Politics. In addition, I have enjoyed writing poetry, short stories, and books since high school and served as a coeditor of the Allegheny Review for three years....

Bio

I live in Northwestern Pennsylvania and currently hold a BS in physics and Psychology based Politics. In addition, I have enjoyed writing poetry, short stories, and books since high school and served as a coeditor of the Allegheny Review for three years. For the past couple of months, I have also been involved in writing articles for helium.com on social and political issues; I enjoy this experience very much. I have recently launched a forum through helium.com on technology and innovation that is designed for scientists and people of all backgrounds. Although I want to make some improvement, it is found at the following address: http://www.helium.com/zone/2307-innovations-and-technologies-that-can-change-the-world--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I mainly decided to write this extended biography to help fellow trigger-street writers understand the reasoning behind my reviews a little better while I also hope to provide a better insight into my work. Furthermore, there are some reviewers who appear to have assumed my more critical reviews of their work were done out of petty spite to trash their work because they wrote negative reviews of my work. Instead of acting as professionals and contacting me for a better explanation of why I made my comments, they decided to undermine me as a reviewer by leaving snide, sarcastic remarks, which do nothing to address their grievances or help us come to a resolution. While I do not personally know these individuals and cannot properly judge their characters, all their comments have managed to do is lead me to believe that these reviewers are petty, arrogant, and insure in their work. Depending upon my schedule, I would gladly have responded to their emails in a reasonable amount of time. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think it would be helpful for me to explain what my goals as a reviewer are and why my reviews can be quite harsh. When I write my reviews they are created without feeling or emotional attachment while I blind myself to the identity of the writer unless I am comparing the writer’s previous works, but this is only done to provide a more relevant review. Meanwhile, I try to separate the writer and the reviewer as I want to avoid skewing my review by considering any reviews the reviewer has made. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, I believe every writer should be judged on the quality of their work, not on the quality of the reviewer’s work. Professional reviews of professional works are generally made to provide potential viewers with a guide to the best movies or books. I view trigger-street reviews as a combination of advertisement and a source of criticism that provides valuable insight on what revisions a particular work might need for it to become a professional piece; therefore, reviews are part of a learning process. A single review does not necessary help a writer, but a collection of reviews describing the same shortcomings can help a writer identify a weak spot in their writing and find solutions to improving the writing. Moreover, it is easier to criticize and analyze than it is to create, so I find the review process is doubly helpful in pointing out my shortcomings as it is far easier to see faults in others while reviews also provide valuable insight on how others view a piece of literature. Therefore, it is imperative that all reviewers be able to equally contribute to the review process regardless of the quality of their work. Consider this for a moment, people comment and judge the shortcomings of politicians, i.e. President George W. Bush, and the flaws of technology, i.e. cars, computers, cell phone, etc…, along with a whole variety examples that few people have the skills, knowledge, and abilities to improve, but people review these aspects of life, because it is helpful for those involved in these areas to have feedback. My point is that even flawed and weak writers provide a valuable review, and so, reviewers should not attack a writer’s work based on the reviews they make as this will undermine the ability of weaker writers to properly review other works. So long as a reviewer is objective, consistent, and attempts to explain what they feel a work needs, they have provided a constructive review. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Critically reviewing another person’s work provides writers with the opportunity to learn what mistakes they make in their writings, which may be the exact same as the writer they had reviewed. Meanwhile, there is an issue of viability and entertainment value that also comes into play when considering a review. After all, every reviewer is asked to consider the piece they are reviewing from the perspective of a studio head as producers must seek out projects that audiences will consider enjoyable, entertaining experiences. When someone posts their work to a peer-reviewed website, they are asking the members of the site what they think of the piece, what the piece is lacking, what the writer can do to make the piece better, and, possibly, what is good about the piece. I try to fill this responsibility by considering what an appropriate audience may experience and providing the writer with a list of areas that I feel need to be improved. I never point to my own work or anyone else’s as a platinum standard nor do I compare their work to mine or any other trigger-street members. On the other hand, I do hold them to professional standards. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I tend to be very critical because I recognize the need to achieve a level of professionalism while I also fully understand how difficult it is to reach that standard without outside input. Publishers and production companies are swamped with underdeveloped works from people, who want to part of a great profession and have every right to reach for that goal, but this desire plugs the markets for those who truly have produced powerful, inspirational pieces of art. The beauty of websites like trigger-street is that they provide an opportunity for their members to reach that level of professionalism before they rejected by publishers and producers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, I have seen what an overly “positive” and “supportive” community, which fails to be realistic, can create. The first year I was a member of the Allegheny Review, which is a fairly strong undergraduate literary publication run by Allegheny College students that features short stories and poetry from around the Nation and the world, this student from another college sent us over fifty submissions at the cost of several hundred dollars. Unfortunately, not one of his poems was able to stir a “maybe” from a single member and, after the first dozen or so, we desperately tried to find a poem that we could feel comfortable with. Despite our rejections, the submissions kept coming with evermore “unique” and “creative” formatting schemes, arrangements, and subjects that only hurt his work further. He must have been under the misconception that our undergraduate review was some sort of a professional publisher or his key to the top, because after he spend all that time and money, he started writing the staff to better explain his poems and why he should be published; he even went so far as to make a special visit to our college campus over the summer break to discuss poetry with the entire editorial staff. Luckily, he couldn’t find those of us who were still on campus, though he did have our names and left a note at our office. The next academic year, he sent us more poetry along with a newspaper article discussing a poetry reading he performed in his hometown. He further explained his professor was encouraging him to pursue his passion and he felt he had improved drastically; he had not. Eventually, our advisor sent him several letters politely requesting that he stop sending submissions and, if he continued to stalk our staff, he would be prosecuted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moreover, we were not in the position to give this person the criticism he needed to improve his poetry as we simply did not have authority to personally address the writers who submitted their to work us while it would have undermined our role as a objective literary publication. On the other hand, trigger-street provides the opportunity to give that input, so writers can benefit from each others perspectives and observations, before they receive rejection after rejection. Overall my goals, as a writer, are to become a better writer while my goals, as a reviewer, are to help other writers reach a level of professionalism where they are the ones who produce the great pieces of literature that the publishers immediately jump on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, of the pieces that I have posted to trigger-street, I have received my fair share of compliments, suggestions, and criticisms. Some of my pieces use a simple writing style as I felt the writing style fit the ideas while other story need a stronger writing style. There is more to writing than constructing complex sentences and paragraphs while using ambiguous terms that a dictionary barely recognizes as there are computer programs which can generate complicated stories based on the most grammatical complex sentences possible that go beyond any human ability. On the other hand, short sentences consisting of a generic subject, verb, and object format have the tendency of being “choppy” sentences as they create a lack of dynamic rhythm, so they fail to hold a fairly advanced reader’s attention; however, there are many incidences where writers perceive the use of short, simpler sentences as choppy when the overall arrange of sentences varying in different lengths, variable sentence structure, and variations of phrases provide the story a quality rhythm. This is not to say my pieces are perfect as I understand there are plenty of areas where I can improve the writing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, paragraph structure also determines the attractiveness of a writing style as lengthy paragraphs can burden a story with over detailed explanations and lead to meandering ideas that hurt the overall structure while leaving the reader feeling bored. Finding the proper balance in paragraph and sentence structure for the story is dependent upon the genre, audience, and purpose of the story. Moreover, because I adhere to behaviorist theories and, like the rest of the psychological community, I largely reject Freudian concepts, I view writing as a psychological interaction between writer and reader, such that, the writing encompasses part of the writer’s personality and projects a image of the writer to the reader while the interpretation of the writing reflects the personality of the reader. In writing, I want to convey action, images, and emotional responses along with descriptions and imagery by triggering an individual’s personal experiences while filling in key and novel details. As academic and technical writing require well-defined, reintegrated ideas and connected arguments, I sometimes struggle with over complicating sentence and paragraph structure, so I try to start with simple sentences that I can build onto when work on creative writing projects. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, the short stories posted to trigger-street were largely created in my sophomore year of high school and revised recently without too great of structural revision as I wanted to test the reaction to the differences in my high school writing styles and my college writing styles. Moreover, even in high school, I could have produced a writing style that was severely more complicated than the ones some of my short stories employ. When I first started writing, I was experimenting with various writing techniques so I could use the writing style and voice most compatible for each specific story, thus, enhancing the story telling quality of each piece. Looking beyond my individual stories, every short story piece I produced was intended to add a unique aspect to a larger short story collection. Looking at collections, such as music albums, many artists produce a few good pieces then everything else in the collection is little more than a weaker version of the good pieces leaving the collection stale and cheap, so when I started writing short stories, I wanted to create a very dynamic collection of short stories that avoids this kind of stuffiness. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Furthermore, as trigger-street began as a place for amateur screenplay writers to receive attention and find opportunities, it is reasonable for writers of additional formats, such as short stories, to expect a similar treatment with the possible hope of having their work published or adapted into a screenplay. Therefore, it is tempting to judge these formats as though they were screenplays. As a side note, I have found the rating system more than adequate for screenplays, but the categories of story, overall, and structure are somewhat redundant for short stories and books while dialog is not necessary as significant of a category; whereas, there are no sections to adequately and transparently judge voice, writing style, and plot. Overall, screenplays differ from short stories and other literary formats as they provide a different type of experience; therefore, the best movie adaptations of books and short stories add a new dimension to a story while capturing the essence of the original piece. In my writing, I have used different pieces to experiment with voice and writing style while I also attempted to create unique experiences for the readers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One major aspect of science fiction is to provide clues throughout a story that demonstrate an ending is probable while the overall plot leads that reader to believe another ending is impending; the ending should be a surprise, but a second read should reveal the clues that make the ending obvious. City Sanctions was intended to be a fast paced, exciting chase that ended with a surprise twist. For at least some readers, I was successful as the ending has surprised reviewers while unusual aspects of the story, such as exploding bullets and the empty streets of New York City, leave the ending with a reasonable probability of occurring. Overall, the story is about creating an experience for the writer while I can easily add a more complicated, in-depth, well developed plot for an adaptation; however, with exception to some revisions that I would like to make, the plot serves the piece well as a short story. Furthermore, there are plenty of stories involving immortals fighting to the death, like Highlander, but I was hoping to leave a sense of timelessness and my own view on how an immortal would view life with Games of Immortal Men. Meanwhile, Mind Games looked to a future where the beauty of technology generates a type of immortal existence for the transition of a long -lived intellectual, whose age has left him with a subtle disregard for the significance of physical life, to a world that treats human life as computer programs; whereas, Men and Their Galaxies was intended to be a social commentary taking the consumptionistic, expansionistic nature of mankind to its extreme. Furthermore, short stories must be extremely focused as there is little room for meandering with a proper double-spaced short story length being no greater than twenty or thirty pages, so I feel, as short stories, my pieces have filled their roles fairly well. On the other hand, the length of a short story can limit what aspects of a story can be developed, so I have found areas where I have over focused on key aspects to the point of neglecting necessities and so I understand my pieces do have shortcomings that reviews have helped me see. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving forward, while I originally came to trigger-street because I wanted to learn how to write a screenplay, I quickly became distracted with the short story and book sections, but I have always wanted to write for the big screen and television. Without understanding the screenplay format, I tried to write scripts for some of my favorite series to experiment and after shelving the project shortly after I started, I recently decided to rewrite some of them into short stories as most of the series have long been over. Surgery Bomber is one example of those attempts, but after posting the story to trigger-street, I can see areas, like the relationships of the characters and the voice, need drastic improved. Meanwhile, my novella Alien Assimilation, which is found under the book section, although it is neither a book nor a short story, was intended to provide an action-adventure plot with a surprise ending looking at the subtly shrouded integration of aliens into the realm of humanity. Meanwhile, I had wanted to post additional short stories, a novella, and a book entitled The Invader’s Diary to the site, but I quickly decided to use the trigger-street experience to improve my story telling ability before proceeding, staring with Men and their Galaxies and Surgery Bomber. Moreover, writing is a learning process for professional writers, myself, and all other amateur writers searching for professional recognition, so I would like to have my work professional published, but I am also looking forward to improving my work.

Submissions by Proxy

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Reviews by Proxy 284

  • Proxy
    a good place to start Credited Review
    A review of Logan
    by Proxy on 05/03/2009
    Logan by John Vaughan is a work that could be turned into a very exciting story. Although the premise is fairly simple, the events within the story are very suspenseful and push the reader to want to learn more. Unfortunately, I think the writing is extremely monotone, so the imagery is rather weak and the action is poorly conveyed. Fortunately, I think the writer can easily... read
  • Proxy
    nice premise Credited Review
    A review of Runnel
    by Proxy on 05/03/2009
    Runnel by Adam Franti is an interesting World War two story told from the perspective of a British solider. I think the writer could improve the work by refining the writing a little more; however, I liked it. There are quite a few places where the writer uses fragments or run on sentences while the paragraphs need to be built around a single topic. In addition, some of... read
  • Proxy
    nice ending Credited Review
    A review of GHOST GUNS AND GAS CANS
    by Proxy on 05/03/2009
    Ghost guns and gas cans by Erick William Mertz is a fairly well written piece of literature, except for some awkwardness in some phrasing, with an interesting plot. While I would like to learn more about the characters as their low brow lifestyles are essential to the ending, the only major criticism I have of this work is that it meanders quite a bit. I would suggest the... read
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Comments About Proxy 62

  • Proxy
    Quote

    Proxy on 04/06/2012

    I just published an ebook collection of the latest versions of my short stories called "Dreaming of Other Realities" for 99 cents, as well as a poetry collection called "A Candle Shrouded in Darkness," through Amazon's direct publishing-available after 2 am on 4/7. Just go to amazon and search my name or the title. Share the news, please.
  • Paul Iacono
    Quote

    Paul Iacono on 02/08/2010

    Holy moley! Just read your treatise on "reviewing". I can promise you, you haven't reviewed anything of mine, and my comments came from my heart, not my bile ducts.
  • moejoe_dreams
    Quote

    moejoe_dreams on 05/04/2009

    This is late and a duplicated comment, but I just came to the conclusion that I never made it a habit to thank those who reviewed my script “Ben the Barbarian” so if I didn’t thank you before, here is a big thank you from me to you for the time you put into my script and review. Sorry so late… hopefully you like and agree with the phrase “better late then never.” Or better yet “stupid is what stupid does”
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