AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

Hi! Erozetta recommended I be brave and take a number.

The story in question may not meet your requirements—it's technically published to Lit as a series with 4 installments—but it's only about 15k words (4 pages on lit) total, so here I am pushing my luck. If you'd like to review only part of it, that is obviously just as acceptable as if you'd like to review none of it (i.e. 100% acceptable). If you do choose to review only a portion of the work, I recommend sticking to the first part, as those that follow are not written to stand on their own.

It was a fairly experimental work on my part. I could say more, but I'd rather not prime you unnecessarily if you don't need additional information.

Series: Butterfly Weed
Part 1: It Ain't Much, but it's Honest Work
Part 2: The Food Court
Part 3: Insistence
Part 4: Untitled Polyptych

Thank you for your consideration, and all that you do!
Absolutely. We'll get to you as soon as possible.
 
I'm hoping to submit something to you guys soon. Does it need to have been published on lit already? Or would you be willing to look at a final draft -- the draft I would ordinarily submit for publishing if not for the opportunity to have your feedback?
 
I'm hoping to submit something to you guys soon. Does it need to have been published on lit already? Or would you be willing to look at a final draft -- the draft I would ordinarily submit for publishing if not for the opportunity to have your feedback?
I think they generally only review published stories, it's not an editing/beta-reading service😁
 
I'm hoping to submit something to you guys soon. Does it need to have been published on lit already? Or would you be willing to look at a final draft -- the draft I would ordinarily submit for publishing if not for the opportunity to have your feedback?

No beta reading, published work only. We have both offered to beta read for the next round of my event, Pink Orchid, but that’s a separate thing from this review thread.
 
Link
@THBGato

Contains spoilers. Anyone wanting to read the story should do it first, because it’s the type that can really be read once.

This story is a cross-breed between an essay on dissociative identity disorder (hereafter DID) and a whodunnit mystery puzzle. On top of these two tent poles you’ve stretched a canvas of a love story, a story about the beginning of a relationship, but the poles are so high your tent can’t quite cover them. The legs are showing, the hem is too short. The third component, intersection between gender identity and DID, is interesting, but it wasn’t really explored. Categorization of this story is debatable, but as there are no suitable categories, I guess this was as good a pick as any.

As an essay about DID, it is undoubtedly factual and very respectfully done. It’s a complicated subject matter to use in a love story, and weirdly enough, my first story on this site was about the same thing, so I should know. There’s a wider discussion to be had on how entitled we are to wield life situations that aren’t our own, and my stance is that it can (and should!) be done, but with warmth and compassion, and I think you pulled that off. Maybe a little too well, but I’ll come back to that later.

As a whodunnit, it is intriguing as a whole, but the beginning was so muddled that I doubt I would’ve stuck with it if not for this review. There’s too many jumps and too many named characters and too many happenings, none of it grounded in anything. I got lost pretty quickly, and as a reader, I’m not the most easily confused.

The beginning, up to the grand reveal, is the weakest part of the story. To demonstrate why I’ll give a kind of “reading diary” of my first read through.

***

Okay, starting from the top. We’re in present tense, and I’m Clara. Dawn is talking to me. There’s Justice, and it’s Friday, and there’s mention of Sol, and they “hit the Hatchett” for Keke’s birthday, and there’s also Haile, and Sol is apparently my partner, and we’re interracial, and my ex was Chen.

But we don’t stay with the story, we jump to “it starts with Xiyang” to an unspecified point in time and past tense. Every time there is a time jump in a story, the reader needs to keep a mental tab of where we came from, and now I’m at -1. Fair enough. There’s a girl snoring on a couch, and Jimbo is a dog, and it’s Sunday once upon a time, and there’s Justice and Jim, and washing machine is on, and “I blame my dad’s obsession with Wuxia”, which I don’t know what that refers to.

(As a non-native reader, the cultural references often go over my head, and sometimes I make the effort to try to find out, and sometimes not. This time not, and I just hope it isn’t essential, or that I’ll remember it later in case it turns out to be essential.)

The mystery girl is Chinese maybe, and I wake her up, and we talk about clothes, and I’m vegan, and there’s mention of The Queen’s Shilling, and The Hatchet, and OMG, and apparently we’re in Bristol, and Amanda and Carrie, and Amanda’s coming out (but who’s Amanda and why do I care?). And there’s Eoin, and Rey, and “I was usually working” but no mention of where doing what, except that it was loud.

We don’t stay with this timeline either because “before I met Sol, I met Dawn.”

It sounds like this is maybe later than the previous section, so now I’m at current time -1, and where we jumped previously to is now current time -2.

One paragraph starts with “If this sounds like I was obsessing over Dawn, I honestly wasn’t,” which jerked me right out of what immersion I had up until this point. Who am I telling this story to? And when? In the “current time”, and when was that again, and where was I now, at -2 or -1?

The trivia list grows: I’m studying Geography and I’m bad at Maths, Dr. Kepple is my tutor, there’s my grades at something called GCSE, we meet at the Union, there’s more places and Frogmore Street and Park Street, I’m English and I’ve grown up in Northern Ireland. Dawn is my tutor in Maths. Dawn’s family in Swindon, and Bristol ACE group, Si and Meghan, and Louise, who is Jim’s girlfriend. There’s University photography society which I’m the treasurer of, and Student Community Action, and Chloe Ngata. I’ve volunteered for the Samaritans and it put me in therapy. Dawn’s parents have a Chinese restaurant at Swindon. (I’ll stop listing the trivia at this point, but it keeps accumulating.)

We don’t stay with this timeline either, but switch to “Sol”, which is now (I assume) current time -1, so I have to push the other sections further down the history pipeline. This guy comes up to me, introduces himself to be Sol, and he has the most atrocious accent.

(As a non-native reader, I’m wary of authors writing accents based on pronunciation. I can read accents, even thick accents, if it’s done right. If not, I’m left with “this is how I, being Finnish, would read this aloud, but now I have to guess how an English-speaking person would read this aloud, and then try to parse backwards from that to guess what they’re trying to convey.” Sol was exasperating. Good thing he only had about three lines in the whole story.)

We talk for about two minutes and later I pester Xiyang into getting me in contact with him.

Sol emails me. We exchange emails but he doesn’t want to facetime or call and he doesn’t have a social media presence.

About here I-as-a-reader was like okay, something’s up. This is not a real person. Someone who doesn’t want to interact for real, and is Facebook friends with only you and your only mutual friend, is doing something shady. They’re cheating on someone, or hiding something, or trying to fuck you over to sell your kidneys on black market. Clara breezes past this, asking questions but then being all happy with getting no sensible answers, and that also makes me side eye Clara and I lose the ability to identify in her the way I-as-a-reader need to identify with the protagonist of the story. We’re halfway through the story and you’ve completely lost me.

At this point, I thought that Sol might be either Xiyang or Dawn coming out as trans, trying to maybe get together with Clara, though I didn’t really believe that either because it didn’t exactly strike me as an opportunity that this handsome man she met would share the same exact facial features and physique as these two female friends of hers. So I was confused as to what was going on, but I also realized I didn’t really care. Despite all this talk about all the people and places and all these timelines, I still had no good grasp on who Clara is, or why she would be so invested in befriending these random quirky Asian chicks she stumbles upon, or why she would be so quick to attach to someone she’s seen once in passing and who raises all kinds of red flags.

***

All the jumping around, chasing Solar system’s different alters, was confusing, but I think what this story’s biggest problem is that it’s not grounded in anything. We don’t know enough about Clara, there’s no real reason to root for her, there’s too much trivia and too little information. Exploring the intersection between DID and gender identity and trans-ness would have been interesting, but writing this first person from Clara’s point of view, you weren’t really in a position to do that, and the story ended just as we were even broaching the subject.

Clara herself, and the story, is accepting and supporting of Sol’s struggles to the point of being supernaturally unflippable. If we knew more about Clara, it might have been easier to buy into how she for example wasn’t for a second worried that there might be a more sinister alter yet to emerge, killing her in her sleep if she dared unsettle the system’s balance, or more mundane trans-related thoughts like we can never have biological children together. Or any myriad of similar things. They’re swept under the rug in favor of this mystery puzzle, which, while interesting, is not very compatible with the love story you tried to stretch over it.

The thing about writing about minorities we aren’t a part of is that while I think it’s important to be respectful and compassionate, we should also get close enough to the characters that they have room to be real people and not just polished, overly positive representations of their minority group. Perfect poster people are not relatable, believable or interesting. For everyone to immediately react to everything only positively, and supportively, and acceptingly, doesn’t ring true to life.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying this didn’t do it for me, because the groundwork was lacking. Give us a sense of your characters, give us a reason to believe in their choices. Don’t give us all the details you or the character can think of, give us the details that matter. If your point of view character is this chatty and busy in her internal monologue, maybe don’t write the story in first person or find some other way to showcase to the reader what they need to pay attention to. Show us the happenings that are relevant to the growth of this character and the story at hand, and no more. Wield the red pen like a battle axe.

I’m not sure there is much here that can be said in mind for your possible future transgender stories. I think this was about as much a trans story as this was a story about an asexual woman or a Geography student. Which is to say, kind of, but that doesn’t really cover it.
 
One of my most avid commenters recently told me that they can’t understand hardly anything from the main character of my most recent work, the most impactful character and the one with by far the most lines of dialog, and I'm rethinking how I do accents. I thought I had it nailed, I thought I was pulling this off, and I don’t. I'm not.

It was sobering.
 
Fair enough. Thanks for your time. Actually, seeing as I'm planning on writing at least two more stories using multiple flashbacks there is some good advice for me here going forward regarding how to handle that and what not to do.

There are probably more useful tips I can dig out of this. As I've just eaten, I'll take some time to digest, both literally and figuratively.

Thanks both.

(Yes, I have a fear of all my characters sounding the same, hence maybe overdo it with accents and vocal tics. But I appreciated the accents in "Digging a hole" and thought you had nailed it. True, it's a shame if non-native speakers struggle with them, but...)
 
(Yes, I have a fear of all my characters sounding the same, hence maybe overdo it with accents and vocal tics. But I appreciated the accents in "Digging a hole" and thought you had nailed it. True, it's a shame if non-native speakers struggle with them, but...)
It's a fine line to walk to show characters from other places, and let our cast be varied and diverse, and then balance that with an audience of varied background and English proficiency.

It's more complicated than I had previously allowed for, and I'll be trying some different approaches going forward. I may end up right back where I started, but I'm at the drawing board scratching my head right now.
 
As a non-native reader, I’m wary of authors writing accents based on pronunciation. I can read accents, even thick accents, if it’s done right. If not, I’m left with “this is how I, being Finnish, would read this aloud, but now I have to guess how an English-speaking person would read this aloud, and then try to parse backwards from that to guess what they’re trying to convey.” Sol was exasperating. Good thing he only had about three lines in the whole story.
One of my most avid commenters recently told me that they can’t understand hardly anything from the main character of my most recent work, the most impactful character and the one with by far the most lines of dialog, and I'm rethinking how I do accents. I thought I had it nailed, I thought I was pulling this off, and I don’t. I'm not.
Yes, I have a fear of all my characters sounding the same, hence maybe overdo it with accents and vocal tics.
Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge and trying to disappear
 
(Yes, I have a fear of all my characters sounding the same, hence maybe overdo it with accents and vocal tics. But I appreciated the accents in "Digging a hole" and thought you had nailed it. True, it's a shame if non-native speakers struggle with them, but...)

For what it’s worth, I can only write the way I write, and have never made a conscious effort of differentiating on speech level how my characters talk, and nobody has ever complained that they all sound the same.

Non-native readers cast aside, how about visually impaired? Have any of the accent-writers tried how that sounds through text to speech apps? I remember discussions where people say they use those in editing process, but I don’t remember this ever coming up.
 
I find it distracting to have to wade through accents, and as a general rule you don’t want to distract the reader from the story.

Character accents can be important, but the narrative can draw attention to these briefly before switching to automatic translation. They become more necessary when there’s difficulty in understanding.

Making characters have distinct voices is something I puzzle over. I don’t know how well I do this.
 
I only do accents that I'm confident I know "from the inside" or for a character who has so few lines that I can fake it with research.

However, I once really wanted to write a character educated in a setting like Eton but had to back off because I couldn't sustain it. I compromised by rearranging his biography: he'd been at the fictional version of Eton for a few years before moving to the states, and a few years later he was trying but failing to hold onto that posh dialect. That worked out great because it enabled me to signal what he was trying to do with any given speech act. If he was losing his temper, pure American English with maybe one beat of RP in there somewhere. If he was showing off, all the RP I work into it. If he was trying to act like a working class tough, I could do it in American vernacular with maybe some Cockney in there as if he didn't really know how to do it in either culture because he was faking it. In the end, I really enjoyed writing that character's lines, what?
 
nobody has ever complained that they all sound the same.
It is something I have noticed working my way through the backcatalogues of some of the more popular writers in the LS category. (Not yours that I recall.) By why would I complain about it? What are they going to do? Go and rewrite their stories and make the voices more distinct? I think not. [When I did make a gentle suggestion in a comment once about something else I received some terse feedback saying "I've been writing this way for 20 years and I'm not about to change now."]

Conversely, I really admire it when writers use dialect and idiom... but then I grew up reading Irving Welsh and Dickens and Ridley Walker and VS Naipaul (even Tolkien does it). I mean, I get it: I really struggled with reading Márquez and Esquiviel having learned peninsular Spanish. But should writers deliberately simplify their writing because they are worried about their readers' abilities to deal with the wonderful rich variety of Englishes out there? I think fiction would be much more boring if they did. Imagine if the BFG spoke like a middle class bank manager?

Now, if I've done the accent badly, that's another thing entirely. If I have, fine, that's useful feedback. But I don't think that's what you're saying, just that it was a barrier to you. (The point of the accent was to create something so distracting that neither Clara nor the reader would realise who Sol was; she's meant to be so discombobulated by his voice she doesn't notice his physical similarities to Dawn and Xiyang. Guess it was too distracting. Oh well.)

Thanks again.
 
Making characters have distinct voices is something I puzzle over.
You distinguish characters by what they say and how they say it, rather than try to force accents or vocal ticks on them.

You show character through word choice, pacing, what they do and don't say, internal narrative/narrator commentary, and telling how each react to others while in conversation.

Readers are going to have their own interpretations of how the characters sound (if they even imagine sound, I generally don't imagine sound. As a reader, I may as well be deaf).
 
You distinguish characters by what they say and how they say it, rather than try to force accents or vocal ticks on them.

You show character through word choice, pacing, what they do and don't say, internal narrative/narrator commentary, and telling how each react to others while in conversation.

Readers are going to have their own interpretations of how the characters sound (if they even imagine sound, I generally don't imagine sound. As a reader, I may as well be deaf).
I think this is well said. Another side of "readers having their own interpretation" is that whatever you write as default speech/unaccented speech will be interpreted differently by people from different regions. When i write Californians, i have to accept that people from other parts of the world will read the words my Californians are saying in whatever default accent they have. Unless you would take pains to clarify the pronunciation of your own accent in your writing, I wouldn't worry about doing that for other accents.

Ask yourself how your character would write down their own dialogue. Would they truncate words and emphasize sounds, or would they simply write the words they believe themselves to be saying?

And yeah you can signal a lot with word choice and rhythm of dialogue. What filler words do your characters use? What idioms and exclamations? Some of my Californians sometimes say "hella", which places them in the Bay Area. Little details like this can make a big difference without becoming disruptive or tokenizing.
 
I think this is well said. Another side of "readers having their own interpretation" is that whatever you write as default speech/unaccented speech will be interpreted differently by people from different regions. When i write Californians, i have to accept that people from other parts of the world will read the words my Californians are saying in whatever default accent they have. Unless you would take pains to clarify the pronunciation of your own accent in your writing, I wouldn't worry about doing that for other accents.

Ask yourself how your character would write down their own dialogue. Would they truncate words and emphasize sounds, or would they simply write the words they believe themselves to be saying?

And yeah you can signal a lot with word choice and rhythm of dialogue. What filler words do your characters use? What idioms and exclamations? Some of my Californians sometimes say "hella", which places them in the Bay Area. Little details like this can make a big difference without becoming disruptive or tokenizing.
I used to be so adamant that i could and should do it my way, and whoever can keep up keeps up. This is as much a referendum on me and how I've been writing as anything else. I don’t do it often, but I've directed this thread to my own writing enough over the years that my body of work is a functional testament to what following this collection of advice can produce.

It's almost funny how one comment that wasn't even complaining, just a mention in passing that they had no idea what one character was saying, has left me gutted and rethinking.

I have never aspired to this thread turning into a vehicle for me to get everyone to write like me, or do things the way I do, or the way @Omenainen does. I do not expect or hope for every piece of advice to be taken to heart, and if anything the variety of all of us doing things our own respective ways is more important than anything this thread could hope to accomplish. It would be a huge failing if I had a hand in stamping out anyone elses creativity.
 
I have never aspired to this thread turning into a vehicle for me to get everyone to write like me, or do things the way I do, or the way @Omenainen does. I do not expect or hope for every piece of advice to be taken to heart, and if anything the variety of all of us doing things our own respective ways is more important than anything this thread could hope to accomplish. It would be a huge failing if I had a hand in stamping out anyone elses creativity.
I remember with affection a comment you wrote on a story eight years ago (after I asked for a critique), where you talked about plot logic and scene shaping, and said the story didn't have that.

The comment crystallised my thinking that I care far more about mood than I do about plot, and subsequently I've realised that many of my stories follow a sort of dream logic. Eight years' later, there's still a lot of walking about, sitting in cafés, more mood than plot. I never took the advice because I realise now, it was about your stories, not mine, but I'll always remember it.

As an aside, that story remains my most commented on story, my fifth most read, sits at 4.8 along with three others, which is twentieth down in my score list. It's one of my "foundation" stories and will always remain so.
 
I find it distracting to have to wade through accents, and as a general rule you don’t want to distract the reader from the story.

Character accents can be important, but the narrative can draw attention to these briefly before switching to automatic translation. They become more necessary when there’s difficulty in understanding.

Making characters have distinct voices is something I puzzle over. I don’t know how well I do this.

For speech I try to focus on the words they would choose, rather than how they'd pronounce them. I will very occasionally write out a stammer when somebody's agitated, and I might spell out something like the "arse"/"ass" distinction since that's already part of written language, but that's about it for spelling. More often I'll rely on vocabulary, sentence structure, and little disfluencies.

For instance, here's Nadja, a native Russian speaker (though not Moscow Russian). Here's how she talks most of the time:

[on a local figure who reputedly slept with Catherine the Great]: "Everybody here thinks he's hero for that. Big deal. She fucked him once, never came back. Sounds like disappointment for her."
"All nice people here. Maybe somebody grabs your ass, that's all."
"She thinks I have some attraction for you."
"I like smart girls. But I wasn't going to make move. Easy to find someone else to fuck, but not collaborator like you."
"Petya and I… He is darling boy, we are friends since school, just friends. Being married is convenience for both of us, he has his life and I has mine and people don't ask questions. You don't need to worry about him."

Some of the principles that shaped Nadja's dialogue:
  • She drops her articles ("a", "the") because Russian doesn't have articles.
  • She is direct and coarse, with terse sentences and a lot of swearing.
  • She rarely asks questions because that might sound like an admission of uncertainty or deference.
  • She uses Slavic naming patterns, where the same name can take different forms depending on context - here "Petya" is an affectionate way of referring to somebody who might be "Pyotr" on his driving license and "Petka" if she were slagging him off.
  • She uses constructions that might be grammatically correct but would be unusual for a native speaker, e.g. "I have attraction for you". (Here the "some" was Nadja trying to dismiss something that she actually feels strongly about, because she's afraid of rejection.)
  • She is capable of speaking grammar-school English when she wants, but mostly she doesn't want because fuck you and fuck your ugly language that we're only speaking because you're too lazy to learn mine. On rare occasions where she does use polished English, it's probably because she feels bad about something she did, and using her articles is as close as she gets to the word "apology".
I don't think I ever explicitly described her accent, but I counted on some of those speech patterns to help suggest it, and I think the others help distinguish her voice from the other characters in the story.

Here's how one of my university-educated white Australian protags might have said those same things:

"Everybody here thinks he's a hero for that. I'm not so sure. Yes she fucked him but she never came back for seconds, doesn't that sound like he disappointed her?"
"Everybody here is safe. Somebody might grab your arse but that's all you have to worry about."
"She thinks I'm attracted to you."
"I like smart women, but I wasn't going to make a move. I can find someone else to fuck more easily than I can find another collaborator like you."
"Peter and I… Love him dearly, we've been friends since school, that's all it is. He's my beard and I'm his. It saves us both a lot of questions. You don't need to worry about him."

FWIW, one of the reasons I'm not fond of eye dialect (the writing-accents thing) is that it feels like it's putting one particular variety of English at the centre of the universe and marking out the others by how they diverge from the One True Version of English. I've seen eye dialect used countless times to signify how an Irishman or Scotsman might sound foreign to an Englishman; I've never seen it used to mark out how the Englishman might sound weird to the Irishman or the Scotsman. It feels like a statement that the Englishman's English is more "correct" than those other speakers' English, and that doesn't sit comfortably with me.
 
I've seen eye dialect used countless times to signify how an Irishman or Scotsman might sound foreign to an Englishman; I've never seen it used to mark out how the Englishman might sound weird to the Irishman or the Scotsman. It feels like a statement that the Englishman's English is more "correct" than those other speakers' English, and that doesn't sit comfortably with me.
Irving Welsh does in "Trainspotting". Told from Renton's point of view, the whole story is written in Scots... so when English characters appear it actually jars. The readers become so used to reading "didnae ken" that when we see "didn't know" from an English character it seems incorrect, even to a English reader like me.

On reflection, perhaps I should have written the whole of The Parting Glass in Irish English, not just Erin's dialogue. One of my WIPs is entirely American and I'm wondering whether to use US spelling throughout or not...

Because you're right: usually there's an implicit 'rightness' to one form of English over another, which is all to do with power and status. ("What ish my nation?" Shakespeare's use of accent for Mac Morris's speech in Henry V is meant to marginalise, not include.)

But sometimes that (perceived) lack of status is a key theme, and the exclusion that comes with it. Using dialect and accent can reflect that.

I love how you wrote Nadja by the way.
 
Hello 🤗

𝙶𝚒𝚛𝚕: 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚞𝚎

This my prologue of my first story, I am still doing the first chapter is a slow burn of an eighteen years old, girl she going into enjo kosai, compensated dating. And how she getting much deeper on this sadly situation.
Who is Aaliyah? What are her hopes and dreams? Why does she seem so naive about sex? Why is she in Japan? How well does she speak Japanese? How self-conscious is she about her height and her seemingly short skirt? What excites her (sexually and otherwise)?

Take your time. Don’t be afraid to explore who your character is and how and why they’re there…
 
Who is Aaliyah? What are her hopes and dreams? Why does she seem so naive about sex? Why is she in Japan? How well does she speak Japanese? How self-conscious is she about her height and her seemingly short skirt? What excites her (sexually and otherwise)?

Take your time. Don’t be afraid to explore who your character is and how and why they’re there…
Aaliyah, is a girl she did a hard exam to go a Japan, and she passed but the life on the country is really hard and worst because she is half afrolatin american and Korean, she is more having the white korean skin and face factions but her body and height is more like a black and latina. It's pretty hard to explain on my english writing. This the spanish to answer your question more fluid it.

Aaliyah es una chica que hizo un examen extremadamente dificil para estudiar en japón en un colegio de elite y que ella paso el examen. La realidad es que japón, en especial Tokio es muy duro de vivir y más si eres extranjero, y muchísimo más si eres coreano mestizo con un afrolatino.

Aaliyah es muy ingenua con el sexo porque, desde muy pequeña se desarrollo y también por su belleza es victima de mucha incomodiad con una mezcla de sentimiento de inferioridad. Hace que sea muy aversiva al sexo y mas por unos traumas que son peores y horribles en su pre adolescencia.

Y su altura le complica usar ropa que le gustaria usar por su pecho más grande de lo normal y su voluptuosidad, por tener un trasero demasiado sensual. La falda del uniforme es nefasta porque por ser la más larga le resulta ser muy corta para sus estandares.

Ama lo que es tocar el violin, es una prodigo pero para ella es una mierda para tocar y todo lo relacionado a dibujar pero oculta ese gran talento. Su estado mental se está deteriorando con el paso del tiempo.

En el sexo eso, lo voy a detallar de una manera muy lenta porque seria spoiler a la historia.
 
Having read your English and your Spanish, I wonder how much better off you would be publishing in Spanish. It's clear that the translation is losing a great deal, possibly because the added difficulty of composing English text causes you to adopt a much more brief, summary-like style.
 
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