Assessment:
Overall rating (5 votes)
Recommended by 2 members.
Undead Flowers
An ongoing series, with new episodes infrequently.
Vampires are walking the streets. You probably aren’t even aware of them: the Living do their thing by day, the Undead by night.
Everything you’ve heard about vampires is lies. They don’t suck the blood of maidens, they don’t torment innocent people and they don’t dress like Robert Smith from The Cure. Actually, that last one’s true.
Reviled by the Living, vampires tend to congregate in quiet, out of the way towns where no one will disturb them and the ordinary inhabitants won’t bat an eyelid. One of these towns is Three Sisters.
Josiah St. John, Joe to his friends, runs a flower shop in the centre of town. A lot of very weird stuff happens in Three Sisters. And Joe always seems to find himself in the middle of things. Undead Flowers is his blog.
Tags: blogfic first person ghosts modern supernatural past tense series vampires
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Editorial Reviews
But which flowers do vampires like best?
Like the description says, Undead Flowers is the personal journal of Joe St. John, a florist in Three Sisters. The small, seaside town has a day population and a night population. The humans during the day don’t know or rather don’t want to think about the night population. Joe is very aware of the night population because they’re his primary clientele. Vampires and ghosts really like flowers.
Each story is told in twelve parts that are roughly 350 words each. Then the 12 stories are grouped in seasons. At the time of this review, the author is halfway through one season. To get a proper introduction to the story and characters, I recommend readers first read the various introduction pages listed on the left sidebar because if you don’t, characters like BriAnna will confuse you. You see BriAnna has a male spirit that she shares her body with, and they switch off frequently, but it isn’t explained except in his/her bio.
The need for the sidebar bios is because Joe is not big on introspection. For a diary blog, this seems a little strange. Only actions and plot are divulged in his entries. No long descriptions or deep thoughts on situations are presented. I found myself often wishing he would linger a bit on something so I could get a better picture of the situation and the characters. The stories themselves are unpredictable. One starts with a guy dieing, and Joe has to help the Grim Reaper retrieve the dead guy to do his paperwork. The B-plot is about a vampire looking for romance and a death threat from a hate group. That’s a lot of stuff to pack into roughly 4,200 words.
The stories have a light, fun feel to them, but don’t quite find the mark. I wish he would write longer posts, more posts, or something because right now, I can’t get into the stories. They go by so fast that I’m left wondering what just happened, and having trouble remembering who characters are. Thankfully, the sidebar’s there for me, but I wish I didn’t need it.
The site is gorgeous, which just goes to show that free templates can be amazing and in this instance, mesh nicely with the content. Richard/Joe allows comments and responds to them.
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Just Not Interested
I’m a little confused. The summary states this is Joe’s blog, in other words, a blogfic. When I started reading it, it had the resemblance of something that could be someone’s blog, we’re talking in the first few paragraphs, and then it quickly launches into full story mode. My question is, who would actually write their blog like this? It’s chapter fragmented, not blog post fragmented. The author had a decent idea but didn’t follow through with the execution. Or didn’t quite know how.
At least the writing isn’t bad. It’s actually quite decent albeit lacking. The story at hand is scant at best (another reason why it’s hard to believe this is a blogfic, it’s nearly all dialogue). I can see it’s trying to capture the whole ‘this is a blog with a story, not a story blog’ feel but again I ask, who would actually write their blog like this? Who doesn’t go off on descriptive tangents and relays what happened almost exclusively in speech?
I read my counterpart’s review after I did my reading on this story and it alerted me to the fact that the confusion I had about this BriAnna character (not to mention all the others that just seemed to appear in the story without any explanation) lay in the character biographies in the sidebar.
No. I should not need a reader companion in order to understand characters. If the information is pertinent to understanding the character, it should be included within the main body of the work. Additional information links are supposed to be just that, additional information that’s not necessarily vital to the story but could round it out for you. If you need additional posts in order for readers to get your characters because the information isn’t in the story, you need to re-evaluate your writing. I don’t care the style the story is written in.
Despite all of this, I was somewhat inclined to read more but I just couldn’t figure out why I wanted to. I think it was simply for the fact that it was exceptionally fast reading. If I let myself, I probably could have clicked through the entire site in the span of an hour. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t really care what I was reading about, the plot was moving so fast that I didn’t have time to get interested in anything and the story was so skeletal that I just didn’t care to fill it in myself. That’s not my job, not when there’s so much to fill. If the author can’t be bothered to write the story with the pertinent information already included, I can’t be bothered to read the required links in order to "get" what I’m reading. That’s not how reading (or writing) works.
Perhaps it’s because the author is trying to stick to this "blogfic" idea but the thing is, right now it’s neither blogfic nor story blog. The writing at hand isn’t believable as a person’s blog and the story is way too thin to be a genuine online novel. The balance is off. It needs to be reworked into one or the other, not an attempt at both.
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