May 29 2012 - Asmodemon - Song of the Sea

[Asmodemon]

Instead of the next chapter for Maiden of Thorns I thought I'd submit a fantasy short story I've been working on. It's a little under 8,000 words.

[cjhuitt]

I have a few reservations with the opening, some of them technical (and opinionated), and others more strategic.

The most nitpicking, and I admit most opinionated, is that I don't get to know anything about the viewpoint character until the third sentence into the story. I admit there are many novels and even some short stories where I'm just fine with an opening that doesn't reveal this right away, but by default I think it should be established right away, and I can't think of any reason why you couldn't, even keeping the flow of the paragraph the same.

The more strategic part is me wondering how much of the first page or so is really needed to begin the story (or even needed at all). The violent death of the fish at the beginning is a good tone-setter for the rest of the piece, so I might keep it, but some of the rest seems unnecessary.

Now, I'm going to contradict myself, and say I also wished for more scene-setting, especially at the beginning of the story. Please don't stone me. However, the details we do get are... not generic, per se, but don't give me quite the detail I hope for. Some examples are me wondering how deep the water is where Linaeve starts, how the water is that day compared to other days, why she wanted to call the ray back, etc. I also wonder, having read the piece, if Linaeve used her song to lure the fish in that she had decided to eat?

I also thought the early dialog between Aria and Linaeve could use some smoothing. The details during the dialog could be reworked a bit to do more showing instead of telling (exemples such as "Aria looked surprised and hurt", and "Aria pouted").

Throughout the story, I thought people's names were used a little too often, instead of pronouns, but now I'm really picking at nits.

The ship coming in on a storm is nicely foreboding, but I thought the story really picked up one Linaeve got near the ship itself and started investigating it. For most of the scenes on the ship, I was right there along with the characters, not getting distracted by many issues. The main one I recall is wondering how Linaeve knew Ranata's name (or knew her at all).

I thought the ending was nicely done, with Lynaeve staying true to her nature, and with her getting her mate. My only suggesting there is to see if you can't draw the anticipation out just a small fraction longer, when the reader isn't sure if Lynaeve is going to take him or not.