November 14th - Eerongal Journeyman's manifesto Ch. 3 [L]

[Eerongal]

Quick refresher on the story thusfar:

Ch 1.

In this chapter, we meet three important characters, Jobber, Zona, and Thu'dane.

It starts with Jobber being chased by a gang of street toughs. Jobber himself is basically a young, small street urchin. We find out that this was due to him swiping something important from them because someone paid to do it. He ditches them using his personal knowledge of the area they're racing through, and proceeds to blend himself into a crowd to get away.

Then The story shifts to Zona. Zona is a mechanic who specializes in steamcar repair, and owns her own shop. When we meet her, she'd just finished chewing out a customer who expected the world of her, and sets about getting back to work. About an hour later, there's another knock on the door. Expecting the previous belligerent customer, she accidentally begins to yell at a new face, someone known as "Thu'dane". Who has come at the behest of his master with a job proposal for her. He isn't terribly informative about the job itself, and leaves her with a contract filled with information and vague promises about her uncle.

Ch 2.

In this chapter, we're introduced to two more characters. Captain Barnabas T. Higgs and his partner Hubert. Hubert is currently backstage at a big promotion for Tipillo steamworks, working some sort of control panel, and worrying about the current sham they're putting on. As he listens to his friend, Barnabas, out on stage giving his performance, he prepares to activate the console. Almost immediately upon activation, he hears some loud and troublesome sounds from the machinery behind him.

Cut to the stage, Barnabas gives the cue for Hubert to turn on the power after unveiling a new car line and some sort of jetpack. The mock "jet pack" activates and near-invisible cords pull him into the air. Shortly after his ascent, he feels one of the ropes snap, and he goes careening wildly over the audience. He's able to regain a little control, but as he swings back to the stage, the last cord breaks, and he goes flying. Landing in the front seat of the car, he's a bit bruised, but none the worse for the wear. And luckily, the audience bought it despite the technical setbacks.

Backstage, Barnabas and Hubert are interrupted as Thu'dane appears and and begins some sort of proposal.

Cut back to Jobber, it's night, and he's out to head to a preplanned meeting place where he is to drop of the package he swiped earlier. He's currently perched above watching the alleyway where he's to meet. He notices two fairly large guys walk up, and lets himself down carefully. After some brief banter and his payment, Jobber hands over the package. After that, the two boys set out to attack him. Luckily, Jobber had showed up a bit early and set himself a bit of an escape route. He was able to get up to a ledge and jump over the two toughs and continued racing down the alleyway. Unfortunately, he failed to notice the people standing at the end of the alleyway until it was too late. Hearing the boy speak, he recognized it as the leader of the band that he had previously stolen the package from.

Ch 3.

That's what went out this week.

[cjhuitt]

I continue to catch up on submissions that went out weeks ago... This is a submission I feel I could spend a chunk of time critiquing, but I'll try to hit the high points and not go into every place I noticed something, though I will probably pull some examples out. A lot of these will likely be about the prose itself, rather than the overall plot (at least partially because I haven't read the first two chapters).

First of all, the tense kept switching between past and present. I assume this wasn't on purpose, because it would change in the middle of a sentence. You can search your document for the words: glances, smoothes, realizes, writes, pauses, hears, sees, notices, croaks, and probably some more I didn't list.

The conversation at the beginning of the chapter to me seemed bogged down by other stuff. I'd like to see a lot of it trimmed so the conversation itself can shine through. Some things to look at:

• bookisms. The characters asked, grimaced, began, objected, retorted, started, and chuckled. I compare this to only four "said"s. Even then, a lot of those can be trimmed and implied by the back and forth.
  
• names in speech. Hubert and Barnabas know who they're talking to. Once is probably fine (each), but it happens seven times in the first section.
  
• exrra activity. In that short conversation, we see dry-washed hands, playing with the envelope, setting it down, frowning, smiling, a deep breath, rolling eyes, chuckling, "continuing a jape", shaking head and sighing. A few of these are OK, but the reader probably doesn't need every one.
  
• adverbs. Nervously, Idly, and exasperatingly. Barnabas also sighed "a heavy sigh", which isn't quite the same but seems close.
  

Between all of these, there is something besides the conversation occurring in every single paragraph, which dilutes the focus of the scene. I recommend trimming as much as you feel you can.

About the conversation itself, a few phrases jumped out. In particular, Hubert at the beginning is shown speaking in a dialect that implies he doesn't speak all fancy-like. However, he then talks about the stranger "deferring" questions, and refusing specifics. That line reads like a more formal or academic speech. Likewise, Barnabas' speech seems a little more refined, but he has a couple of awkward statements also, including "the sham is done away with" and "talk to the coordinator of tonight's disaster and square away any of our business left here. I will worry about this proposition laid before us..."

I liked the indication that Barnabas wasn't going to be talked out of the adventure.

Whew. That covers the first 350-ish words. The areas I saw to critique do get less concentrated, however.

At the beginning of the first section with Jobber, I don't feel like it's fully in his POV at the beginning. In particular, the paragraph where he falls and the next one seem oddly remote. I'm not entirely sure why.

The next paragraph, where he hopes the metal isn't too rusty, threw me off for a bit. I assume it's his thoughts; you might want to indicate that somehow. It's possible setting it in italics would be enough.

The metal object Jobber finds isn't described well enough to me, and I'm left questioning if it can do all that is described. In particular, how big is it? It is apparently big enough to stab him in the side, small enough to be hard to find, large enough to saw against (and how was it held then?), small enough that he apparently wasn't caught carrying it when being escorted, small enough to fit in his pocket, but large enough to use to lever apart a latching mechanism on a window.

Some of the text order is odd in Jobber's sections. For instance, we read that he tries to pull back before we read about the fist coming at him. Near the end, he glances back and freezes before noticing the shadows and steps of approaching people.

In the Zora section, you got into a sentence rhythm where you consistently describe one action happening with another. Setting aside [...], she pulled [...]. Checking herself [...], she smoothes [...]. Grimacing, she realizes [...]. This also happens in the last paragraph.

Zora's speech didn't make any sense to me. Was she talking to herself? I expected that to either be overheard from someone else, or her talking to someone else.

Is just Zora ignorant of why the southern region is dangerous? Or is it nearly everyone in the story, and we've only got rumors to work with?

In the last Jobber section, he takes good cuts on the hand. Are there cuts he considers good?

Finally, the last paragraph of this chapter. Jobber just recklessly jumps off a third-story window, trusting to luck? That seems quite odd, although bear in mind I haven't read the previous chapters. If he didn't just jump, you might want to clarify the paragraph.

Overall, I like the drift of the story, and it doesn't seem like you're spending a lot of time at any one part of the story -- just focus on a character (or set), show what's going on, and move on. (Though the Zora part slowed this down a little.) It reads a little like the preparation for an Indiana Jones movie, or a 50's adventure movie. I hope that's what you're going for, because it seems like that would be fun to read.