"My heart sank as an elderly lady, who must’ve been about eighty, began explaining to me her problem."
Heh. I remember this feeling very, very well. I wonder, though, if you could give us even just the start of this conversation - as far as the old lady starting to describe her problem and the narrator's sinking feeling while listening, maybe. It wouldn't take that much longer than the summary you've got, and it would help us empathize with the narrator a little more. That kind of immediacy is useful, particularly at the beginning of a story.
There's something about the way the narrator initial describes Lance that sounds very feminine. Maybe it's just the way you seem to be setting him up: as the jock/heartthrob archetype.
Your mom jokes? That sets a pretty firm age, in my mind. I'm thinking early twenties at the oldest. As long as that's what I'm supposed to think, no problem there.
The dialogue between Lance and Kail itself is fine, but even though you have particular actions assigned to each dialogue attribution here, the fact that you've attributed every one feels a little bit tiresome. You could probably lose some of those actions, "then I remembered, "he shook his head', or whatever altogether and we wouldn't miss them.
I'd like to see a little more tension when the guys in suits show up. We see that Lance doesn't like them - but we don't really know if he's afraid, angry, or not. If Lance isn't the type to show a whole lot of emotion, it wouldn't be bad to get a bead on what the narrator's thinking either. Is he afraid? Confused? What's going on in his head? Also, shorter sentences can really help put some extra terseness in there; your sentences tend towards longer anyway (note: not necessarily a criticism) so it wouldn't hurt to show some variety. Diction can help here too. You're using a lot of fairly neutral verbs in your descriptions. Maybe the guys don't "break off and take different aisles towards our area like they were trying to surround Lance"; maybe they stalked him down the aisles, surrounding him. That's a poorly written example, but you get the idea. And I think you could apply it to more than just this line (though trying to do it to ALL your lines isn't necessary either).
"Other people on the floor had started to take notice of the group of men..." - I should bloody well hope so. What are they doing, other than just watching? What does the confusion sound like? Again, this might help to add to the tension; more than that, this helps ground us in your setting.
:People started screaming and running away once the shot was fired..." - again, show us. You don't have to spend a great deal of time here, but you've missed the opportunity for some aural or visual imagery. Are people pushing and shoving as they run for the door? Do we hear just screams, or maybe people's feet hitting the floor? Did I just accidentally write a rhyming couplet?
(Hey, at least it wasn't in iambic pentameter...)
"The suit with the knife in his neck started to raise his gun, but Lance kicked him in the head, making his shot go wild." I'd be tempted to delete the "making his shot go wild", but alternatively, if you want to keep it in ... where does the shot go? Does it hit or nearly hit someone else in the background? By the way, at this point I'm starting to wonder where the other two suits are, and why they're not doing anything.
I seem to be noticing the same things over and over again in terms of your actions scenes, so I'll re-emphasize: More varied sentence lengths, more actual images (not necessarily visual, aural and other senses too, where they fit) to help ground us in the scene--and to help us keep track of where the characters (and objects) who aren't the focus of attention are. It's a tough tightrope to walk when the focus is so intensely on one thing, but remember that your characters do not exist in a bubble; and as readers, we only need the smallest reminders to accept that there is a world outside of where the protagonist is looking.
"I looked at the huge, bloody faced guy in confusion. He looked back at me. It was a very awkward moment." I love the understatement here. Very effective.
The CRT helmet - awesome. More images like this please!
"The front of his white shirt stained black" - another nice one.
Kail is holding his dying friend. We have absolutely no bead on his thoughts. He's probably totally panicking right now. If he's not panicking, he's in shock. I think we need to see an indication of either one here.
Kail tucks the gun into his jeans. He's worried about running around covered in blood but doesn't think twice running around armed? Either this is weird, Kail feels better for being armed despite its conspicuousness, or you Americans really do run around with guns on you all the time...
Kail writes that he's in shock - over the shooting, over Lance's death, his violent impulses. I kind of like the way you've phrased it here, so instead of saying show not tell, I'm going to say show AND tell. Aside from Kail telling us that he's in shock, we haven't seen any indication of it. We probably want to see that indication a bit earlier than this. This line here would then be Kail calming down just enough to realize the fragile mental state he's in at the moment.
It's nice that Kail takes a moment to try and collect himself, despite the urgency of the situation, but again, you're basically telling us his thoughts here: the gunfight, Lance shouting as he dies, the dying suit. This is an intensely vulnerable moment, and if you use it right you could get us a LOT closer to Kail than we are at the moment.
Aaaaand he decides to get up and go just as the guilt kicks in. Yeah, we need to see more stuff like this; THIS is the kind of characterization we want.
"I looked at all of the stuff like it was part of some bad joke." What if he didn't just look at them? What if he started to laugh or something? I could see a little bit of hysteria sinking in by this point.
Kail has a fairly lengthy paragraph where he dons some of the items taken from Lance, tries on the bracers, etc. The level of detail is great, but getting it all at once feels kind of ... draggy. If you can't spread it out somehow, you can probably get rid of one or two of those details and they woudln't be missed much.
"I was sure it would be full of wands or pixies or something." Nice. I LOLed. (Good grief, I just used an Internet acronym as a verb. I am obviously far, FAR too tired.)
I like the wry humour in the last line of the chapter...
I'm not sure you want to have these guys actually kick the puppy. Kicking the puppy has become the instant stand-in for showing all things evil in the world. That and children.
I wonder why it hasn't occured to Ellie to call the police yet, or threaten to.
"Oh ya, and he gorgeous." This line seems really out of place with the rest of Ellie's persona. I kind of get the feeling that it was phrased this way to throw some humour into a terse situation, but if that's so, it kind of fell flat for me. I think it's fine for Ellie to notice that this guy is attractive, and it doesn't NEED to be humorous. It's just the way it's phrased that seems off to me.
So far, I have the same thing to say about Ellie's encounter with the suits as I did Kail and Lance: This situation needs more tension than I think is actually present. Again, I htink it's diction that will do the trick for you here; you're using a lot of neutral words. Find some loooooooaded ones. But don't overdo it, of course.
I like that Ellie is so unmanned by a single slap. It's very realistic. (Okay, and then she sacks up again afterwards. Still.)
Regarding Flo's comment, I'm not certain it's necessary to REALLY hurt her. That is, I don't think they need to cause permanent damage necessarily. Just the fear of being hurt, and pain itself, can go a long, long way - even more so if it's something you're not used to. Maybe if you emphasized that more it would help the believability issues some people seem to be having
And actually, I think it would make a nice break from the usual torture scene with all its melodrama and permanent physical mutilation.
Judging by the ease with which these guys found Ellie - suits are phoning her house, for Pete's sake - you'd think they could track Lance down just as easily. Either Lance had some way to avoid being found, in which case we'd better learn about it later (don't worry, for the moment I'm willing to wait) or they're after Ellie for some other reason and Lance just somehow made things convenient. I'm content to wonder for now. But I am wondering.
Okay, I'm having a bit of a problem with the age of these guys: I keep reading them as older than they apparently are. You keep sneaking in details like the fact that Kail gets paid $9.00 an hour, his your mom jokes, Ellie's remark to Kail about "my dad's gonna kill you one day". These details are great, and normally I'd laud you for it, but they shock me every time, because the person I've been reading as twenty-five has suddenly turned eighteen.
Regarding the whole Ellie chapter starting in the morning: I still don't think it's a huge problem, really; I think people should be able to make the leap. But then again, it definitely would help to have some line, early in the text, that specifically fixes the timeline for the reader, to make sure there's no confusion. Scanning what you've written, I can't think of an easy way to do that, or an obvious place for it. Maybe you could find one. Or maybe you could do something even simpler, like head off the chapters with the date and time. The one problem with that is if you do that for the first two chapters,people might wonder if you're not consistent about it later, and since I haven't seen the rest of your ms, I don't know if you want to be consistent with it. Or ,as you mentioned in the post above to Renoard, you could delete the Ellie-Kail scene altogether; I don't know how much we would lose. It's nice to see their relationship there, but presumably we'll see more of that in chapters to come. Of course, you may want us to be able to compare their relationship before the bad stuff happens with their relationship after. It's up to you.
Nice detail about Ellie's Arabian stallion (though, if the horse is a stallion, it's uhhh, probably not a she). Now we know for sure that she's financially pretty well off. Or that her father is, at least.
Wait, Sonja is Kail's mom? Wasn't Ellie waiting for Sonja to come home in the earlier scene? I'd thought Sonja was a roommate or something. Now I'm confused.
Oh, okay. So maybe Ellie isn't quite as financially well off as I thought (re: Sonja's line about the Arabian). And now I know why a "rich kid" is working at a call center for nine bucks an hour. Again, nicely worked in.
So, you were asking how Ellie was working as your female point-of-view character. I don't see any problems with her that can't be fixed fairly easily. I think the problem is that you're consciously writing Ellie as a
female character rather than a character. For me the problem comes when she says things like "my cute chincilla" or "my cute daschund" or even the way she refers to Corwin as "my puppy" all the time. Those read to me like you're announcing that Ellie is female. You don't need to announce; the reader already knows, and as long as Ellie rings true as a character, we're happy to believe that she's also a female character. You don't have to go at all out of your way. And again, you've a knack for those little details that also help reinforce Ellie's femininity. The moment where she compares her much smaller stature to the suits is another.
To include, or not to include (chapter 2): That is the question. The answer: Yes. I like it for two reasons: This nice, quiet scene where Ellie hangs around at home, makes pancakes for her dad, etcetera, etcetera, makes an excellent contrast to Kail's first chapter, which throws us headfirst into the action. Contrast is good. I also like it for itself. There were times when the prose dragged, but I've already pointed some of those out, and the scene as a whole felt well-paced; it didn't seem unnecessary. And it means that we get to know Ellie BEFORE the thing with the suits goes down, which is really helpful. It's hard to start a book off with a lot of action - by which I mean bullets and fists flying - when we don;t even know the characters. You did a competent job of this with Kail, but because Ellie has been introduced to us fairly thoroughly when the suits show up, we care more.
Overall, stylistically: I really think it would help you out to vary your sentence lengths a bit more; you use a lot of long complex sentences and it gets a bit tiresome and talky at times. I think you could also cut down on some extra adjectives and trim some verbiage by watching for phrases like "started to pick myself up" when you could just say "I picked myself up". And while I know we're all sick to death of the phrase "show don't tell", I think you can do a lot more by showing than you are. Even the smallest things - "a piercing shriek" versus "somebody screamed" can be incredibly effective.
Alright. You can breathe a sigh of relief now, because I'm done. I'll shut up now.
...Okay, no, I won't shut up. I'm just going to go let loose a bunch more hot air where you don't have to listen to it.
Hope that helped.
