Brief comments: "I have come to watch the world end," to me sounds so tired and overdone that my first reaction on looking at it is 'oh, not another one of those.' And I'm not usually a jaded kind of jaguar.
The "dance club" line is grabby, because a dance floor's business is to have dancers, and for a deserted one to look ready for business it must have some other business that I want to know about. Secret meeting place? Alien abduction zone? Who knows. You do!
"Tachtli" and "Selene" are classic ideas, very sturdy, not too obnoxious and not too dull. Tachtli gets additional points for being obviously South-American in influence, which is fairly unusual. Plenty of Celtic and Scandinavian fantasy worlds, but not too many Mayan, Aztec or Incan ones.
I voted down the ones that got a single "1." "Starving," struck me as a little silly, since you can go without food for a lot longer than ten days, so the narrator seems a little whiney. If you changed that to 'Going without water for ten days,' then I'd have to read the next line to find out if 1. The narrator was human, or 2. the narrator or her circumstances are special, or 3. You don't know anything about biology. *laugh* Michael's temper tantrum isn't interesting in and of itself... I'd want to know what inspired it in order to decide if I wanted to bother with another whiney teenager/child. "Dust motes" was prettily descriptive, but belongs in the middle of a scene-setting paragraph, not at the story's beginning. I don't want to read a story about dust motes. I want to read about people. Tell me about them first.
"Self-respect" was just too pithy. It sounds too generation-y.
"World news..." I couldn't decide if the reason it should be interesting was that it was misspelled, and so of course couldn't be the reason why anyone did something right.
"Ground beneath her cheek" is a sleeper good opener. I didn't realize until much later that it had potential, probably because of the clause on its end, which softens the impact of the engaging part. I'd chop the sentence before the clause, and then work the clause into a new sentence, if it were me.
The god line and the bullet line have been done before, but they're so nicely phrased I'd be willing to see if the author had something new to tell me about them.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2003-10-15 04:39 am (UTC)The "dance club" line is grabby, because a dance floor's business is to have dancers, and for a deserted one to look ready for business it must have some other business that I want to know about. Secret meeting place? Alien abduction zone? Who knows. You do!
"Tachtli" and "Selene" are classic ideas, very sturdy, not too obnoxious and not too dull. Tachtli gets additional points for being obviously South-American in influence, which is fairly unusual. Plenty of Celtic and Scandinavian fantasy worlds, but not too many Mayan, Aztec or Incan ones.
I voted down the ones that got a single "1." "Starving," struck me as a little silly, since you can go without food for a lot longer than ten days, so the narrator seems a little whiney. If you changed that to 'Going without water for ten days,' then I'd have to read the next line to find out if 1. The narrator was human, or 2. the narrator or her circumstances are special, or 3. You don't know anything about biology. *laugh* Michael's temper tantrum isn't interesting in and of itself... I'd want to know what inspired it in order to decide if I wanted to bother with another whiney teenager/child. "Dust motes" was prettily descriptive, but belongs in the middle of a scene-setting paragraph, not at the story's beginning. I don't want to read a story about dust motes. I want to read about people. Tell me about them first.
"Self-respect" was just too pithy. It sounds too generation-y.
"World news..." I couldn't decide if the reason it should be interesting was that it was misspelled, and so of course couldn't be the reason why anyone did something right.
"Ground beneath her cheek" is a sleeper good opener. I didn't realize until much later that it had potential, probably because of the clause on its end, which softens the impact of the engaging part. I'd chop the sentence before the clause, and then work the clause into a new sentence, if it were me.
The god line and the bullet line have been done before, but they're so nicely phrased I'd be willing to see if the author had something new to tell me about them.