Hatrack River Writers Workshop: The Phoenix: Novella

This is topic The Phoenix: Novella in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by David (Member # 4125) on :

This is a rewrite of a story I wrote for my science fiction class at UVSC back in 2000, which never actually got published because our magazine was for some reason cancelled.

It's actually sort of a prequel to Agents of the Balance, and I've begun to think it might be a better place to start, assuming I don't get picked up by my current query that's out. Not finished with the rewrite, but I figured I'd get a feel for the general opinion of how it starts.

I'm shooting for novella length, but it may end up being a short story.

----- The Phoenix -----
Sondheim turned a rigid glare out the spacious portico of industrial cement, her eyes affixing on an arbitrary point in the dim, slate-coloured morning sky. Already the gaseous tendrils of chemical waste were marbling their browns and greens across the tainted blue atmosphere, lending the thinning upper layers a harsh and mottled malady.

Sixteen attempts to disable the device from Earth, and yet the Phoenix still stayed its course in orbit over the North Americas. Time is running out, she thought with a clench of her jaw.

"Orderly Six-One-Seven is sorry, Colonel," the electronic voice mewled from the floating orderly machine that waited at her back. "Cromkey was too old. His heart gave out."

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited December 08, 2006).]

Posted by pixydust (Member # 2311) on :

quote:
Sondheim turned a rigid glare out the spacious portico of industrial cement, her eyes affixing on an arbitrary point in the dim, slate-coloured morning sky.

The first hing I notice here is all the adjectives. Five in the first sentance alone.

Plus, I'm still not sure what exactly is going in.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

Yeah, something like that.

Posted by Elan (Member # 2442) on :

My first thought as well... adjective overload.

Try to tell the story without disguising it behind all the superfluous verbiage. Everytime you throw unneeded description into a sentence you create distance between you and the reader.

You are trying too hard to make us see through your eyes. Give the reader a little wiggle room to create imagery. Make a sketch of the images, but don't hammer each and every little detail or you will jar us right out of the flow of the story, and the story is what is important, not a bunch of details that don't affect the plot.

Posted by Swimming Bird (Member # 2760) on :

quote:
Time is running out, she thought with a clench of her jaw

Did anyone else read that to mean that clenching her jaw enables thought?

Posted by Jenn (Member # 7798) on :

Adjectivey, but interesting. I wanted to read on.

Posted by januson (Member # 4194) on :

too much description, too many adjectives in the first paragraph, as has already been noted.

a "malady" is a disease, by the way, which is, i'm fairly sure, not what you were saying the upper layers of the atmosphere had

probably just a typo, but where are the "North Americas"? did you mean North America or the Americas?

And, like another commenter before, I thought "Time is running out, she thought with a clench of her jaw" was worded as if the clenching brought the thought. it would work better as "...she thought, clenching her jaw." while commas can be easily overused, sometimes you really need one