Today we see that ill-matched tenses confuse readers.
What I gleaned about the stories: People who go outside experience weather.
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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: One sentence into the first story, I encountered: We lived in harmony: I clapped, and it would move; The Box clapped, and I would move. Semi-colons start a new clause, but not a new sentence, so the capital T hooked my eye. As I had barely started, it was enough to bring me to a halt.
Analysis: A few sentences into the second story I hit: Trees loom above and, even while stripped naked by the wind, seemed to have an imposing presence; The story had, until then, been in the present tense, so the sudden shift to past perfect made the verb stand out. Because of the slight delay introduced by the subordinate clause, I wasn’t certain for a moment whether there was a shift or whether I had somehow mis-parsed the tense previously. So I went back to check.
Going back to check while I’m still in the first paragraph is a clear loss of immersion, so I moved on.
Analysis: The first paragraph of the third story had the same present/past tense uncertainty that the second one did.
Obviously, it’s fine because he continues walking down the street at a brisk pace. It may be a nuisance, but rain is good in this day and age; while there is no vegetation for it to water, the tiny pores in the pavement allowed the water to travel into the underground drainage system.
The shift leapt out again. However, as it was possible that the past perfect was intended to indicate the pores had allowed the water but no longer did I chose to go on, anticipating the next sentence would begin with ‘At least until…’ or some other reference to how or when the pores stopped working. When the next paragraph continued to describe an entirely mundane walk through the rain, I pulled the plug.
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My interpretation of the first WTF: The author may have been capitalizing “The Box”, because they considered it to be a proper noun. Not sure if this would still be a syntax problem, given that ‘The’ might not be capitalized in this case.
While IoD is focused more on specifics than a holistic experience, there is still subjectivity, so the WTF wasn’t for an unambiguous error so much as the book making me stumble.
Re-reading the quote, I think I was primed to stumble by a prior issue I hadn’t consciously noticed. Pronouns refer to the previous suitable noun but there isn’t one here; so the proper noun in the third clause should come in the second clause, and ‘it’ should go in the third.
Which would also remove the ambiguity over whether the author intended ‘The’ to be part of a proper noun or mistakenly capitalised.
As Jeff has said before, the first page should show the reader that the author knows what they are doing so that if the author does something that seems odd the reader trusts it will be explained later.