This is a piece of a short chapter that is part of a rambling novel effort. I'm not sure which chapters belong at this point, so I'm just sifting through. I'd be interested to get any impressions on the pieces. If you'd like to read more, please let me know and I'll be elated to send words your way. Gut-level honesty will help me most, the good, the bad, and especially the indifferent.

Thanks so much...
____________________________________________________
It's dark and I'm crying and the floor is cracking under my feet. Fifty thousand hipsters, it turns out, were not wrong: this is the edgiest party of the year. But hipsters are high or stupid, and what does that make me. I want acceptance so complete it fades to the background and lets me emerge whole in relief. But you cannot be cool and of right mind, and I am cursed with right mind. I hate it.

I am also too old to be here. Warehouse parties with floors that might crumble beneath the partiers' feet should be populated by kids still in talks with immortality. My mortality is like a pet I never wanted, but to whom I grow close over time, despite myself, simply from time spent together. It cozies up to me at night when no one else will.
____________________________________________________

The floor is cracking under her feet, then the MC goes off on a different tangent - what about the floor? I would be getting out of there. The MC is "cursed" by being of "right mind." Yet if this is so, why is the MC there?

I would like to "see" more of the scene. Flashing lights, throbbing music, strands of drivel hanging from the chins of zoned out tweakers who have their melons on chemical overload,
copulating couples on the floor - get us into it.

[This message has been edited by nitewriter (edited June 09, 2007).]
 

The 13 lines makes incorporating the feedback a trickier decision, because it doesn't in this case give enough context, I don't *think.* Debhoag, the floor is cracking, and not crackling. The area he's in is actually away from the rave/party--he's wandered off into an empty space. And this opening is a present-tense that is sort of the middle of the story, a take-off point that isn't revisited for a while, so the immediate action of the party isn't relevant.

*However,* I need to really look at this and the impression the first 13 had on you all, and make sure it's effective in the bigger picture.
 

I was under the impression that she had wandered off, or that she was alone in the building, after the fact. Like, there was a rave, she was too old, everybody left, and now she's sitting on the cracking floor.

I thought the cracking floor was literal though. Like the floor was actually cracking.

As I thought she had wandered off from most of the partiers, and from most of the noise and lights, I felt in the scene. The character was the focus of the scene to me, not the setting. So I thought all of the descriptions (Or lack thereof) were appropriate.

The feelings of mortality part kind of stuck out to me -- As in, it kind of took me out of the story. But, in the story's context, it might make more sense.

I would keep reading it, if it were a book.
 

quote:

---

It's dark and I'm crying and the floor is cracking under my feet. Fifty thousand hipsters, it turns out, were not wrong: this is the edgiest party of the year. But hipsters are high or stupid, and what does that make me. I want acceptance so complete it fades to the background and lets me emerge whole in relief. But you cannot be cool and of right mind, and I am cursed with right mind. I hate it.

I am also too old to be here. Warehouse parties with floors that might crumble beneath the partiers' feet should be populated by kids still in talks with immortality. My mortality is like a pet I never wanted, but to whom I grow close over time, despite myself, simply from time spent together. It cozies up to me at night when no one else will.

---