Local Authors > Reading Excuses

PHYLES Chapter one Pt. 1

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maxonennis:
Okay, I don't think I emailed everyone, so if you didn't get an email and one one, please let me know.

Anyway, let 'er rip.

Reaves:
Wow thats kinda creepy.

I'd be interested to hear your reasoning behind writing it in first-person.

It seemed kind've short also.

Very interesting magic thus far although I wasn't really sure what the time period was. For some reason I got the idea it was modernish, but that's just me.

WEKM:
Haven't been able to read it yet as it was send in DOCX format and my pda couldn't open it. Have it converted now and will read it today.

Silk:
I forgot to stick a no .docx files request in the Rules of Reading Excuses thread. It's there now.

Doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of discussion on this one, so I'll just post my comments wholesale. Oh, now that Reaves mentions it, he's right, I didn't know what the setting was either. Actually, I had the opposite assumption, that it was a somewhat more medieval society (though that may just because it's what I'm used to reading) though words like dining room and whatnot do seem to give it a more modern feel. (Not that I really think  those kind of words are really a problem. There's a certain amount of Babelfish going on whenever you read something said in a period piece. I wouldn't get too worried about it unless you find it REALLY throws people off, and it didn't me.)

My comments:

I love your first two lines. Very nice.

There’s a lot of reflection within the first page or so. I think it’s all good but I wonder if it would be more effective it could be spread out over some kind of action. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated; just him standing up, or maybe looking at the box with the knife in it, or whatever. It’s not until just after the start of the second page that we have any idea what the narrator is doing.

I thought that you were just a little heavy on the descriptive details. Every now and then you throw in adjectives that I don’t think we really need, because we already know the character is small, or has dark hair, or what have you, and it’s already clear who you’re talking about.

On page four you make reference to Phyles’s hemorrhaging cut. I get the impression that she’s been dragging this wound around for a fairly long amount of time. If it was bleeding that badly, is still bleeding that badly, she should at the least be passed out from blood loss by now, and probably dead.

You have a lot of “doing this, character A does that” sentence constructions in this piece. When you’re ready to edit, you might want to go back and look at those, get rid of some of them. It helps a lot to vary the sentence structure of your writing, I think.

So far I’m interested in your characters and your world and think you’re doing a pretty job of setting things up. It would have been nice to come back to the first person narrator and find out what his (her?) connection to all of this is, but it is just the very opening of the piece, so for the moment, I’ll trust the author and assume that it’s coming later. I do think that we should start getting hints, at least, fairly soon.

jjb:
Yes, I second the motion that you send it again as a .doc file.

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