Reading Excuses 20150831 Scholomancer Chapter 7 and 8

[rdpulfer he/him]

(So I'm trying something a bit different this week - I'm sending two chapters instead of one so you can get a better picture of the narrative. This submission ran a bit long this week - just over 5000 words. If it's too long to read, just let me know)

 

Previously, Robert Renfield has been struggling to reclaim his life after betraying his Master Dracula and leaving him at the bottom of the ocean one year ago. His only allies are his psychiatrist Evelyn and "sponsor" Bannister. Most of his fellow outcasts hate him for his actions under Dracula, leading Renfield to consider fleeing to Mexico altogether.

 

Meanwhile, vampire hunter Stephanie Van Helsing has been contending with bizarre visions while continuing the hunt for Renfield. Confiding only in her mentor Irving and her partner/sometimes-lover Jason Harker, Stephanie must also contend a big shakeup in the vampire hunting organization Westenra, which plans to hire the private military corporation Quaris to oversee the hunt for Dracula. Stephanie later finds her colleague Jack Seward badly wounded in his safe house, muttering incomprehensibly. She tries to help him, but suffers yet another vision

[Mandamon he/him]

Chapter 7 gives Renfield some more depth, but I'm not sure what it's really adding to the story, unless his mother is important or Sophia is going to pop up later.  Even if she is, right now this doesn't add a lot, especially since you cover Renfield's presence in the next chapter.

 

However, I do like that you have the overlap in chapter 8 between Stephanie and Renfield, seeing the same room from another POV. But, there's still a lot of repeated words and over-explaining throughout.  There's also a big mental switch between Stephanie blacking out, coming to terms with her mentor's murder, playing off Jason's feelings, and coldly tracking down Renfield (before the rest of Westerna does).  I'm not sure there's enough time in between to really process the emotion.

 

 

Notes:

 

pg 1: "partially mostly obscured"

--extra word

 

pg 1: "Renfield entered the bland, beige elevator and didn’t stop until he reached the elevator."

--I'm guessing one of the nouns should not be "elevator"

 

pg 1: lots of repetition of "elevator" and "basement"  Also, do basements usually contain dead rats?

 

pg 2: I like the alternate history with Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

pg 2: "Dust spewed into Renfield’s lungs"

--Probably not of its own accord.  I would assume Renfield would need to breathe it in first

 

pg 3: the part with the Bible was interesting, but I'm not sure how relevant

 

pg 4: "twenty-two year old college student’s"

--you just said "college student," so you could leave this as "twenty-two year old's"

 

pg 4: "so seamless that not even his nervous fidgeting and babbling could ruin it"

--wouldn't nervous fidgeting make it...not seamless?

 

pg 5: "my"

--his (twice in a row)

 

pg 6: "“He is okay.”

--I presume you mean "isn't," since his throat has been torn out.

 

pg 8: "lighting storm visions"

--what is this?  Did I miss something?

 

pg 8: "lighting in my visions"

--Lightning, and have we seen these visions?  I don't remember

 

pg 11: "stumping him in the back of the head with the revolver"

--I don't think that's the word you want.  Slamming?  

 

pg 14: "I can’t think about that right now. Focus on the mission."

--Actually, she's driving to the safe house, so she should have plenty of time to think.

[Asmodemon he/him]

I concur with pretty much everything Mandamon has to say. In addition, I do have the following points I want to bring up.

 

Worthless in the near future: The crate of money is not worthless in the near future, it already is. The way I read it there are only five hundred, one thousand and five thousand dollar bills left. And those can't be used anymore.

 

Safe house: Interesting bit about Lee Harvey Oswald working for Dracula, but it’s spending a lot of words on a chapter where nothing really happens. If you removed chapter seven and have Stephanie find him as you have in chapter eight you won’t miss anything. Stephanie can find the obsolete weapons and money if you want to remark on it. She already remarks about the Brides of Dracula, so you don’t need the Sophie flashback either – and if you do need it, I’m sure you can tie it in with another chapter centering on Renfield.

 

Sophie/Sophia: While it is interesting to see Renfield’s modus operandi when he served Dracula I’m not buying Sophie going with Renfield. A seamless approach is not nervous fidgeting and babbling – either it appears that he lacks confidence which is not really attractive or he’d come across as sketchy. Also, you change her name from Sophie to Sophia halfway through. Is that because you made a mistake or because Sophie turned into a vampire and that prompts a name change? If the latter, you really need to set that up better.

 

Bible: For some reason when Renfield starts reading the bible I assumed he  started reading at the beginning. So the combination of him being halfway through Leviticus and ‘falling asleep with a few moments of opening the Bible’ kind of threw me off. Aside from that Leviticus is pretty long, reading to halfway if you start with that chapter doesn’t take a few moments.

 

Irving: We already know he’s a traitor due to a previous chapter and while it is good that Stephanie is finding out things I feel like it’s a bit soon. There’s not much time between it being revealed through Irving’s perspective to the reader and Stephanie finding it out here. The realization that her doctor is lying to her about the visions could’ve sparked similar questions(to what she’d be wondering about) in the reader, but the reader already knowns, so the moment is kind of wasted.

 

Also, a little nitpicky, Irving’s slip up by revealing more than Stephanie told him is a bit of a cliché: “I never told you that”.

 

Trust: Stephanie brings up a valid concern, that Irving knows more than he should. I was surprised that there was no sign in Jason that he believed her. Jason doesn’t trust Stephanie much, does he? Combine that with him laughing when she nearly fell down the stairs last time and this is the most dysfunctional relationship I’ve read in a while. Not sure if that’s what you want to go for here.

 

Crying: Didn’t buy it, Stephanie seems tough as nails, so based on prior experience this seems out of character. She’s a Van Helsing and keeps making a point that she has a name to live up to. Crying because some weird rust is happening to her doesn’t feel like something she would do. Apparently it isn’t strange since it didn’t set of any red flags in Irving or Jason.

 

Trust part 2: Jason put his hands up, he really didn’t trust her not to shoot him. And she had no qualms about hitting him in the head. She thinks she’s sorry, but for someone who didn’t hesitate to bludgeon the man she loves with a pistol on the back of the head, hard enough to known him out, ignoring the high chance of causing a head injury, I don’t think she’s all that sorry. Again, this relationship is dysfunctional.

 

Stephanie and Renfield: Finally, these two people meet! I’ve been looking forward to that for a while now. Looking forward to seeing where you take this.

[Kammererite]

Stephanie chapter was much more interesting then Renfeilds which was a little bland but had unique elements to it.

 

Upon reflection i would think Jason would have clued in to hanks deception. Was he not with Stephanie when she told him about the visions? He might have missed Hanks comment about the lightning because he is worried about Stephanie but i think he would clue in when Stephanie starts flipping out about it..  

 

Old money. I don't know how it works in the US and i can be wrong about how it works in Canada, but the bills would still be legal tender regardless if they are in circulation or not. Thus not worthless. If anyone but a bank would accept them is a different question.

 

Cool alternate history about Oswald!

 

When Stephanie hits Jason, the sequence is a little unclear

 

Stephanie says tying him up would take to long then the next scene Jason is zip tied. seems inconsistent

 

I like Stephanie's comment on the next step with Jason.

 

Also for wording i noticed: 

 

Page 1

Few knew the basement of this building spilled far more blood then the sixth floor.

-the wording of this sentence does not flow for me.

 

Page 6

"No," Jason said softly. "He is okay"

Missing word i think?

 

I am very excited to see what happens now that Stephanie and Renfeild are together.

Cheers

[rdpulfer he/him]

Thanks for all the feedback. I definitely agree Stephanie's chapter was far more interesting than Renfield's. The flashback to Sophie is relevant, but I do think I still need to split Stephanie's chapter up since so much happens in that one chapter. I also might kept Stephanie's realization about Irving under wraps a bit longer - so the moments not wasted like Asmodeon said. Also, good point about Jason not trusting Stephanie . . . I definitely need to re-think how he approaches this turn of events. Thanks again for all the feedback so far! 

[rohyu he/him]

I like the end of chapter 8. It is a good cliffhanger

.

Pg1: It's "Led Zeppelin"

pg5: I don't understand why the Master doesn't find people to eat/convert himself. Maybe I missed something in previous chapters. Is the Master just forcing someone else to do his work because he can?

pg6: "Someone tore Jack’s apartment." I think you meant Someone "tore up" or "tore apart"

pg8: "Stephanie froze as still as a statute. She had visions – she told this much to Irving and Stephanie" 

           I think you meant she told "Irvine and Jason."

pg9: "This isn’t my mother. This isn’t who I am. This is me." That group of thoughts confused me.

pg12: " All she could think about was getting option,..." This sentence confused me.

pg14: "This place is too exposed, too open to be the safe house." On page 13 you say that she knows where all the safe-houses are because she is a Van Helsing. I think that if she knew where every safe-house was, she would know the ins and outs of those places as well. 

 

I like the tidbits of information in chapter 7, but I think the chapter is lacking a compelling conflict. 

 

Stephanie crying was out of character, but I got the impression that was the idea. She is trying to turn away suspicions about her behavior, and crying might convince Irving she is truly hysterical. I think Jason might see through it, but you can put in a line about Jason commenting about how out of character she is acting once Irving leaves the room.

[Shrike76 he/him]

A decent pair of chapters, though the wording during the action sequences often gets a bit muddled and could be cleaned up for the sake of brevity and clarity. I was glad to see Stephanie acting with some sort of goal in mind, but would have liked to see more from Renfield besides him needing a place to nap.

 

C7P2:

"Worthless in the near future": Nope. If you have an old $500 bill on you it's still worth the face value of $500, legally. They just don't make them anymore and the banks pull them out of circulation when they receive them. Their value as a collector's item will vary based on rarity.

C8P2:

 - "Blood flowed from his throat..." - It shouldn't be flowing. Blood stops leaking out of a body pretty soon after the heart stops. It can be pooled there, or congealed there, but it shouldn't be flowing by this point.

C8P10:

- The safe house. Stephenie knew where the safe house was (she had them all memorized). They know enough that a trigger goes off when someone uses the safe house, but she doesn't know exactly where it is behind the wall? Seems strange.

C8P11:

 - After all the effort by Stephanie to be quiet so as not to wake Renfield she... wakes him up. If she'd been quietly snooping looking for information, that's one thing, but she had the gun pointed at him already. Just wake the guy. And probably from a bit of a distance, not inches away, for the sake of not having the gun knocked out of your hand.

Throughout:

 - Renfield's chapter alternates between "my Master" and "The Master" and "his Master". At least you're consistent with the capitalization of Master, but "my Master" should probably be reserved for 1st person narratives. The exception would be if Renfield has been conditioned to use "My Master" as a proper name rather than simply an identifier, in which case all instances should be "My Master". At any rate, it's confusing to have lots of different identifiers. Pick a standard and run with just the one I think.

 

Things I would have liked to see:

 - Exactly what Renfield was looking for. He spends a lot of time rummaging, then decides he needs sleep. If he didn't actually need anything in the room, and was just looking for a safe place to lie down, the rest is largely irrelevant, apart from providing exposition. The downside of that is that it's obvious that it's exposition.

- More of Stephanie's thought process in the scene with Irving and Jason. She's like a dog with a bone when she's grilling Irving at gunpoint. Then she's sobbing into Jason, and then she's Black Widow again and he's out cold. By the end, I knew what she was doing, but this chapter was in her POV, we should have seen a bit more of her intentions. Make it so that I know what she wants to do and am worried about whether she'll pull it off, rather than make me wonder what exactly it is she's doing in the first place.

 

Grammar stuff not already covered by others above:

C7P1: 

  - The elevator lunched to life - It must have been hungry. launched.

C7P4:

 - Hampered with experience - inexperience?

C8P1:

 - "his hands shaking his own" - Not sure what you were going for originally but this is wrong. Is he shaking Stephanie's hands, or were you implying that his hands were just shaking?

Throughout:

 - You're still using Westerna instead of Westenra.

 - "descending down" - Redundant, and you did it once in each chapter. You can't descend up.

[rdpulfer he/him]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm definitely going to make sure Renfield has more to do in the chapters leading up to his confrontation with Stephanie. I also want to make sure Stephanie's manufactured hysteria is believable, for both her and the people buying into it. Thanks for the notes on how to make it work.

 

A word on the currency: I think my point was Renfield spending a whole bunch of money from 50 years ago would attract attention. Do you guys think this is the case - that it might trip some red flags? 

[Shrike76 he/him]

A word on the currency: I think my point was Renfield spending a whole bunch of money from 50 years ago would attract attention. Do you guys think this is the case - that it might trip some red flags? 

 

Yes. There's a huge difference between the money being worthless and it being worthless to Renfield, and that could be played up to great effect - him having an abundance of what he needs but in the wrong format. "Water, water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink" and so forth.

[Robinski he/him]

As usual, detailed comments below. I like the action in Stephanie’s scenes now, and that there is some real progression to her story, things getting very much worse for her and giving her a challenge. She is also in conflict with a lot of people now, and Irving’s deception is in play. This is all good, and makes me want to read on, whereas I felt that before people were kind of stumbling around without any real motivation or purpose.

 

The hacking of the lift bugged me a good deal. There’s no way you can just stuff a couple of wires into key hole. Details have to be convincing to be accepted by the reader, I think, even if it’s just throw-away stuff.

 

Stephanie knows the alarm has been trigged, but she just marches into the basement with a torch. Surely she should be more cautious, expecting to find an enemy there, but she seems completely incautious and rather amateurish in her actions.

 

The end of Chapter 8 felt awkward to me. Her saying “get up” doesn’t seem the tensest point to end on.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------

 

“partially mostly”

 

“Lead Zepplin” – Led Zeppelin

 

Seem s like the first ‘elevator’ should be foyer or something like that.

 

I do like the alternative history about Oswald and the fact that he actually shot JFK – ha, ha. Seriously though, good line about him being Dracula’s servant.

 

I felt there was a lack of description of the scene. I felt that Renfield was alone, so there was no chance of anyone else coming into the lift, but I presume from the statement that there are people milling around, they just aren’t described.

 

The phrasing about the basement tripped me up. I mean, it’s not the basement that spills the blood, so I would have thought something like “Far more blood was spilled in the basement...”

 

When you start talking about the bed, has Renfield passed through the hidden door? I had no sense that he did, which makes it sound like the bed and everything is out in the general basement. If that was the case, surely it’s been there since 1963, and the authorities would have found it.

 

You use Renfield almost every time you refer to him. I think it’s too much. Once you’ve said ‘Renfield’ once you can use ‘he’ for much longer before using the name again. I feel like I'm reading “Renfield looked at Renfield’s reflection in Renfield’s shaving mirror...”

 

Lithe and slim mean the same thing. Also, “hampered with experience”? Should that be inexperience? And I would think “hampered by.” Further, what tense is this section in – I presume it’s a recollection, but the use of tense didn’t convince me. I did like the scene though, it’s a very dispassionate description of a gruesome, heartless event.

 

Is her name meant to change from Sophie to Sophia?

 

“fed to his master”

 

I like the exploration of some of Renfield’s past deeds, but I feel that the writing could be tidied up. I also don’t feel anything towards the setting, which isn’t really described at all. This puts a lot of weight on the characters to carry the story.

 

“tore into Jack’s apartment”? The sentence isn’t complete.

 

“He isn’t okay” – did you mean?

 

“stared blanked blankly”

 

“to bring him again”?

 

Why put a break in before she grabs the hoodie? There doesn’t seem to be any passage of time, and there’s no change of scene.

 

Next step that who had in mind? I don’t get that. Irving? It’s not clear to me.

 

“getting option”? – Don't’ understand.

 

Her hacking the lift it totally unconvincing, there’s no way you can just stuff a couple wires in the keyhole. That’s designed to open up the panel. I can’t believe that there are any key circuits behind that, or that she can see where the wires are going. How are they connected to the key points in the circuit?

 

There is no “they” arriving in the basement, just Stephanie.

 

“sidearm” – one word. There are a lot of words that I think should be hyphenated. I’ve not commented on them throughout, looking back, safe-house is one, I think, living-room, another. That’s my view, worth checking.

 

“so as not to wake Renfield” – This is redundant, it’s completely obvious why she’s walking softly.

 

Why is Renfield’s head small – bizarre!

[Robinski he/him]

Part of the problem with Renfield is I have no idea what his motivations are. What is he trying to achieve? What is driving him? Why does he go to the Book Depository?

 

As I mentioned above, I found that in the early parts of the story character actions are a bit directionless.

[rdpulfer he/him]

Thanks Robinski. I'm going to work on solidifying Renfield's motivation in the first couple chapters.