posted
Ok. well a little long this one, so feel free to crit either the first 13 or the whole thing. Just let me know. It's spec fic, sort of alternative world fantasy thing...
~~~~~~~~ Path of Light – 6700 words
Richard hugged the shadows. His breathing grew ragged as he watched the streets for signs of the nightwalkers. His hiding charm would not last much longer and he had to return to his sister, Marie. She would not survive for long alone.
Satisfied that the way was clear, he stepped out into the road and scurried along the main street, hugging close to the shadows of the buildings. A woman’s scream stopped him in his tracks. He dove behind a row of trash cans. He gave scarce thought for the woman’s fate. Only a fool would walk the streets at night unprotected. It was likely that the Ghouls had caught her. Not his problem. All he was worried about was making his own way past the alley.
posted
Hmmm….story starts right here. No setting so far. You have given the reader something to worry about – his hiding charm not lasting. And also, there is his sister’s chances slipping away. This is good. It raises interest with concern. Then you make him a bit callous with his ignoring the woman’s scream. Not that he shouldn’t ignore her…but the exact wording of his reasoning is working against you here.
You mention two night time perils: the nightwalkers and the Ghouls. This is slightly confusing. Is “nightwalker” a generic term covering a variety of nasties preying on the streets and Ghouls are just one of such? Or, are there two (and probably more) separate kinds of things (one called nightwalkers and one called Ghouls…and why is one capitalized, not both?) slinking about? I believe that tiny bit of confusion is bothering me.
The “his breathing grew ragged” that is…it feels so…not classy. Could you try again to give the feel of ragged breathing? Maybe through his muttering to himself? Muttering about being a fool to be out on the streets at this hour? I think that belongs more to his situation than to his reflection that the woman shouldn’t be. Her scream just verifies that he’s right.
Maybe it is that everything is so generic. Hugged…the shadows. Shadows of what? Watched the streets. What kind of streets? Is this urban or suburban? Pavement with trash blowing in the wind or cobblestones smeared with horse manure? And His “hiding charm” is what? An oral spell or a magicked bag of unicorn tail hair? No, no long descriptions, but find little ways to sneak it in in an active way.
Is this opening working? Not quite, at lest for me. You’ve got good material but need to make the words you string together to show it…make them read smoother.
Does that make any sense to you? This is just my opinion, of course.
posted
For the most part, this works for me. I'm interested in what's happening, but I do think you can pretty up the sentences a little bit to make the flow more even. (Think metric prose.) Posts: 2 | Registered: Aug 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
i would have to agree with arriki, in fact you use the term hugged and then hugging to describe his movements in both paragraphs. Ghouls seems a little second grade to me, try to come up with something that isn't so over used. It doesn't lend it credibility, I cannot suspend my disbelief, not that that is enirely neccessary right here in the first thirteen, but it helps to have something more beleivable than 'Ghouls'.
Posts: 60 | Registered: Dec 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I like that this starts by dropping us right into the action. The second paragraph was a bit choppy, though. Most of the sentences were short and broke it up too much. A variety of sentence lengths would make it flow smoother. Posts: 97 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
The only shortcoming I have with your story is the term ghouls.
Ghouls is an ok description and it may work for you and your character. However, is the reveal going to be that they are pretty much ghouls as we the reader understand them?
If not juxtapose a different name for them, something unique and creative and see what your reaction or the readers reaction is.
Something dark and sinister and unknown where the reader wants to know what these things are, what they look like, how they act and sound.
At the moment if I think of your 'ghouls', as anything other than the pedestrian version of ghoul, I am intrigued because I don't know what they are or what to expect. Otherwise I go 'ho hum' another group of ghouls cometh.
Take for example the story 'Grooglemen' by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald. When I read this I kept asking myself who are these grooglemen? Why can the other characters wear their skins? Why if you wear the skin the other grooglemen don't realize you are an impostor?
The reveal was that for their characters the grooglemen were not ghouls or zombies or beasts. They were scientists wearing biohazard suits. But the name 'grooglemen' kept me going back and back to find out what they were and why the characters were terrified of them.
quote:In the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, a ghoul is a member of a nocturnal, subterranean race. Some ghouls were once human, but a diet of human corpses, and perhaps the tutelage of proper ghouls, mutated them into horrific, bestial humanoids. In the short story "Pickman's Model" (1927), the first of Lovecraft's ghoul stories, they are unutterably terrible monsters; however, in his later novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), the ghouls are somewhat less disturbing, even comical at times. Richard Upton Pickman, a noteworthy Boston painter who disappeared mysteriously in "Pickman's Model", returns as a ghoul himself in Dream-Quest. Similar themes appear in "The Lurking Fear" (1922) and "The Rats in the Walls" (1924), both of which posit the existence of subterranean clans of degenerate, retrogressive cannibals or carrion-eatings humans.
So in the case here, the ghouls here are once-human eaters of human flesh. There are of course real ghouls in this world. Ghouls of the nature the word is derived from.
quote:The Arabian ghoul taken from the original Persian is a desert-dwelling, shapeshifting demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyæna. It lures unwary travellers into the desert wastes to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children and robs graves to eat the dead.
I'm not a DnD person, so anyone who relates to that, I'm sorry.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
