Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Working title

This is topic Working title in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Jonny Woopants (Member # 3004) on :

This is the firts 13 of a short Sci-Fi story based loosely on the Gaia philosophy that spectulates that planets are in fact living organisms in themselves.
The piece is currently about 3000 words long and I'm looking for any kind of feedback about the hook, style etc...if any one would be kind enough to crit the finished product should be available by tommorrow if I stop hanging around this site and get on with it... here goes:

The cosmic stones wax and wane somewhere beyond this stifling blanket of molecular hydrogen that swamps the sky. As celestial heavyweights slide past one another uneasily in the darkness of space, the ground beneath my feet heaves and groans, tectonic plates are bullied and buffeted by the invisible brute strength of gravity, and fountains of lava erupt from great yawning rents as though the very earth itself is spewing indignantly at the torturous forces that beset it.
We lost a third probe today .Or perhaps I

Posted by pantros (Member # 3237) on :

Too hard to read for me to care why I have no clue who or what should be important in this story.

Very elaborate description. Any one sentence is an artisticly good sentence. All together like that, its a jumble with no reason to keep reading.

Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

For me, the hook was on that last line: "We lost our third probe today." I want to know why. Great hook!

Problems I had with paragraph 1:

*Until middle of sentence 2, I didn't know there was a "me" to have a POV. Tell us up front
*I don't know what a cosmic stone is, or how they can wax and wane, or why molecular hydrogen is stifling
*I guessed that a celestial heavyweight was a planet, moon, star, or asteroid, but they don't slide past each other (since space is empty), and I don't how this could be uneasy
*Etc.: dense writing that's hard to process, either because I don't believe it, or I have to work to interpret the meaning
*...and it doesn't seem relevant. I'd just skip paragraph 1 and get right to the hook.

Posted by MG (Member # 2938) on :

I agree with wbriggs, the hook is 'we lost out third probe today'.

I'm so unoriginal that I will agree with pantros as well: elaborate description...too elaborated maybe.

If you could pull out a few adjectives and adverbs, you'd have a much cleaner, smoother prose.

When I have to read a paragraph in which every noun has a modifying adjective and each verb its adverb, I forget what I'm reading; I end up modifying what I just read.

That said, I liked the way you described everything from 'celestial heavyweights' onwards. I have no idea what cosmic stones look like as the wax and wane

Posted by Monolith (Member # 2034) on :

I'm totally lost as to what's going on, until the last sentence. Who's talking? Who's POV are we supposed to be in? Those are the questions I'm wondering about.

Those are the nitpicks. I do like the descritive words and all, but IMHO, you need to set up the whole first paragraph.

Those are my thoughts.

-Monolith-

Posted by Jakare (Member # 2960) on :

I am also very interested with the hook about losing the probe. I understand that you are looking for a Gaia premise. Just as a thought you might show how some of the things you were explaining affect the characters in your story. Show how they see the planet lives, breathes, reacts.rtc. You might have already done this later in the story.

I would be interested in reading the rest and giving a more complete critique.

Posted by sojoyful (Member # 2997) on :

I won't repeat what others have said, but I will echo them. Way too flowery. Whatever the heck you're trying to say, just say it. Also, the hook is the probe sentence. Definitely.

Posted by Spaceman (Member # 9240) on :

You must realize that this kind of story is going to have a very limited audience. Many people won't like it, but the people who do like it will like it a lot. I've written similar stories that I thought were supurb, yet critiques were pretty harsh, calling it too much like a science lecture--yet that was exactly what I intended. I had a personal rejection from Stanley Schmidt at Analog on one such story, so it wasn't off the dung heap.

Just because the vast majority of the readers here don't particularly care for the opening, I don't think that for this particular story you should be all that concerned. You have to write this kind of "BIG" SF story the way you it works for you. Most of the normal rules are irrelevant because you aren't looking to please everyone.

The only changes I'd recommend would be to work on the language for clarity. We've had a related discussion on another board, and one of our conclusions was that readers can only absorb information so fast. You need to break up your imagery or the reader experiences sensory overload, gets bored, and stops reading. The content is fine, the order the information is presented is fine. the style is cumbersome.

[This message has been edited by Spaceman (edited November 24, 2005).]

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

I'm glad Spaceman said that.
I agree about the clarity comment but I see nothing wrong with what you have done.

Like WBRIGGS said, I like the hook too and the line that confused me was:

quote:

The cosmic stones wax and wane somewhere beyond this stifling blanket of molecular hydrogen that swamps the sky.

Mainly because I wasn't sure what you meant by 'cosmic stones' whether it was asteroids or moons or planets, and I wondered whether they actually waxed and waned or if they only appeared to wax and wane. So, because this is the first words, and I felt on shaky ground as far as understanding what you meant, it is hard to get past it, though the rest of it was fine.

I did wonder whether a planet could be 'indignant'.

Hope this helps.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 24, 2005).]