Today we see that a single misplaced comma can be enough of a bump to derail a reader.
What I gleaned about the stories: If you really want to be an eccentric businessperson, you need to have tower blocks torn down and rebuilt just to change the light in your office.
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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: The first story opens with: He loved the velvet covering he’d hand stitched for the Codex. Immediately, I was curious: why had the protagonist made the cover of velvet? Why had he hand stitched it? As the paragraph continued, other velvet items of a modern nature were revealed, making velvet seem more than simply a material chosen for a book cover and also implying the protagonist had access to wealth; this just increased my curiosity as greater riches and a modern setting suggested hand stitching was a choice rather than a necessity.
Analysis: Several pages into the first story, the protagonist is described as the decipher of a document. As a person who translates a message is a decipherer, I was unconsciously expecting an extra syllable; the absence felt a little like the jolt of hitting a pot hole. Knocked out of my flow, I had an instant of wondering whether decipher was a noun (perhaps an antonym of cipher), but that didn’t work either because it would refer to the document and not the protagonist.
While still interested in the story, I had shifted fully into analytical mode so moved on.
Analysis: The collection opens with paragraphs set in the traditional fiction style of indented first line and no white space between. However, when I passed the end of the opening paragraph of the second story, I discovered neither indent nor white space. My immediate thought was that I recalled the previous story being set differently, which triggered a flick back just to be certain I wasn’t misremembering. This back-paging would have been a sufficient sign of lost immersion on its own; however, it also separated me from the story enough that the typesetting portion of my mind had space to warn that paragraphs without indents or a clear space between were at risk of running together.
My faith that the formatting would support a fluid reading experience damaged, I moved on.
Analysis: Slightly over a page into the third story, a cosmic threat is described as an: ageless, durable, being. Where a list of discrete adjectives precedes a noun, commas separate the individual items from each other and no comma separates the final adjective from the noun they modify; a conjunction between the last two adjectives is optional. So, when I hit the comma after durable, I was primed to parse the next word as an adjective or the start of an adjectival phrase; thus, hitting being, a noun, left me flailing to resolve my mental image.
My faith in the smoothness of the experience lost, I pulled the plug.
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