Re: ChrispenryCate - polish.

[Xelah]

An excerpt from something I've submitted.

A few things to know that would have been established earlier in the work that are not covered here:

• Lycno = In universe slang for Lycanoplasia, the disease that causes everyone mentioned here's shape shifting abilities.
• Wilde = Psychotic shape shifter with Lycno (other kinds of crazy shapeshifters exist)
• Tony is a were-rat.
• Claire is a were-cheetah
• Carlos is the same werewolf from the other thread.
• All of these characters are in an abandoned and rundown airport hunting a pack of Wildes along with a large number of reinforcements.
• Many of the Wildes are former Houston SWAT team members, but not all.
• The narrator cannot use his shotgun as a firearm because of temporary interference from one of his magical abilities, and has been using it as a club.
• Everyone mentioned is in a half-animal and half-human form.
• Non-Wilde shape shifters have a bandanna around their necks to distinguish themselves from the Wildes.
• The narrator has just been sidelined after a brief struggle by the Alpha Wilde.
• When Coyote appears as a proper noun at the end, it refers to the Native American deity with that name and would be familiar with anyone to anyone that's read that far.

-----------------------------------------------------

I scrounged up the will to get up again in time to see Claire crash into the ticket counter. I hobbled over to where Claire had fallen. Blood gushed from a wound on her inner thigh. The wound itself looked minor in comparison to some of the others, but the amount of blood told me that it must have hit an artery.


I pulled off the cloth from around her neck and tried tying a tourniquet around her leg, but my fingers kept slipping. I shifted to human form for more nimble fingers. I got the knot as tight as I could, but the blood only slowed. I couldn't get it tight enough to stop it. Claire forced me to re-tie the knot when she shifted to human form suddenly. Everything below the leg wound stayed in beast form.


"It’s cold."


"Stop talking like that, you’re going to make it damn you!" I put pressure on the cut.


"How did you get arrested for smuggling parrots?" I turned to look at her face. Color faded fast.


“Louis heard this great story about how to make a few grand going to Mexico." Something started to burn under my eyes.


"You might want to tell this story a little faster."


"The story Louis heard was about how a guy fed an expensive parrot a shot of tequila and stuffed it in his girlfriend’s purse and walked across the border through customs." I must have taken a cut to my face somewhere because I just felt something roll down my cheek.


"So then what?" Her voice came out in a strained wheeze.


"Louis figured we could get a truck, a bottle of tequila, and thirty parrots, and drive through customs and be rich once we got to the other side."


"What?"


"Yeah, he wasn’t paying attention for the part where if the guy got stopped by customs, he was going to tell them he had no idea how the parrot got in there. It must have drank the tequila and crawled into her purse."


"Customs didn’t believe a flock of parrots got drunk and flew into the truck?" I had to lean close to hear what she said.


"Something like that." I watched as her eyes stopped moving and the last of her color faded.


It took a moment for me to notice there was still a battle going on behind me. The big werewolf howled in triumph above Carlos’s bloody corpse. Otherwise the fight looked about even. My heart skipped a beat when the big werewolf made eye contact with me.


I’d never felt so exposed and alone; my human form may be larger, but beast form is stronger by about a third. The big Wilde killed Claire. Then it killed Carlos. Now it was going to kill me. I grabbed the shotgun and scrambled around behind the counter. I choked off my urge to flee immediately when the Wilde jumped onto the ticket counter. The synthetic stock of the shotgun splintered when I drove it into the wolf’s ankle. Then I ran.
I didn't care where I went. Anywhere had to be better than right next to the wolf. I ran back in the direction we came from.


The big wolf staggered behind me. He couldn’t manage much more than a trot because of the damage I did to his ankle. The look in his eyes told me all I needed about whether or not he’d stop chasing me.


I dropped the shotgun and jumped for a ventilation duct that had fallen through the ceiling and hung a few feet over my head. My fingers held, but the whole duct along with part of the ceiling crashed down on top of me. Sharp pain ripped into my leg around my thigh when the duct fell on it. I felt the bone break. I felt tech return too, but at this point, it might as well have been another bone breaking.


I pulled myself to a sitting position and tried to lift the duct off me. Every movement made me want to throw up. I fell back onto my back ready to let the wolf have me.


The wolf didn't keep me waiting, but at only a few steps from me, a dog-sized rat ripped into the Wilde’s leg. Tony, you idiot! Get out of here! I wanted to yell that, but the words wouldn’t form. I tasted my own blood as it seeped up my throat and out my mouth.


My neck refused to look behind me any longer and returned to a neutral position. I heard Tony giving the wolf hell, but I knew better than to expect a seventy pound rat to kill a four hundred fifty pound wolf, even if I had hobbled the brute with the shotgun.


The shotgun? I looked around for the stupid gun and found it just out of my reach. I pawed at the shotgun with the tips of my fingers. I heard a distinctly rat-like squeak behind me. I jerked toward the gun. Pain from my leg coursed through me. I felt like I was going to black out. Not with Tony in trouble.


I grabbed the shotgun and pulled the bolt back but it didn’t go forward. The damn thing isn’t loaded! I found a pair of shells in a clip along the front grip. I rammed one in and the bolt slid into place. I aimed as best I could at the Wilde and pulled the trigger. Buckshot pounded the Wilde’s shoulder as he readied to put a foot through Tony’s throat.


The Wilde fell back a few steps then toppled over. I took a deep breath and let it out. The shotgun fell beside me. "Tony, are you okay?"
He grunted something before screaming. I craned my head around in time to see the wolf getting back up.


I fumbled for the gun again. Claws scraped against the floor behind me. The second shell slipped from my fingers when I looked back at the Wilde. It crawled toward me, jaws agape. I froze.
Something caused it to stop and look back. Bless that little rodent! I grabbed the shell and struggled to reload the shotgun. The shell fell into place. The bolt slid forward. Teeth sunk into my shoulder.
I put the end of the barrel to the wolf’s forehead and pulled the trigger. Regenerate that, motherf****r!


My eyes felt heavy, my body tired. Not the tired of Lycno shutting me down to heal, more like life itself oozed out of me. I hefted myself up to resting on my elbows. I looked over the spattered remains of the Wilde. Tony wasn’t moving. I wanted to call for help, but words would not form. All I could manage was an agonized groan.


I fell back to my back. Darkness came. Time to go get even with Coyote for that crap with the skinwalkers. That a**hole owes me, big time.

---------------------------

I've read through that a few times and think the bullet list should cover most of the missing info.

 

[The Judge]

Since I feel faint at the thought of blood and I hate fights, I had real problems reading this! Next time pick a love scene.

I'll have a go at a quick nit-picking, as I find that easier than looking at bigger issues:

I scrounged up the will - not sure if this is one of our linguistic differences again. To me 'scrounged' means getting something by dubious means just short of outright theft. There's certainly no implication of effort, physical or mental, which I think you need here.

you’re going to make it damn you - comma needed before the 'damn'.

I turned to look at her face - coming immediately after the speech, ie in the same para and with no intervening attribution, I was thrown as to who was speaking, since it's the convention that the first named person in the narrative is the speaker. It isn't until 'Her voice' later on that I was clear who said what and then I had to work backwards to check my first assumptions were right. You do it again with I had to lean close - because the 'I' comes before 'hear what she said', it throws us for an instant. Far better to put this in a separate line of its own.

Color faded fast - I think it might help to make it clearer by saying it is her colour; I also think use of the continuous past, 'was fading', would improve it as a line.

Something started to burn under my eyes - sorry to be stupid, but what? If it's him crying, does he have to be so coy about it? And why under his eyes?

I must have taken a cut to my face - the trouble with using a first person narrator is that unless we have reason to doubt his veracity we believe him when he says something like this. Again, why so coy? If he doesn't want us to know he's crying, why has he mentioned it at all?

My heart skipped a beat - more usually used as a phrase for excitement rather than fear, I'd have thought. It's cliched anyway, so I'd avoid it.

The synthetic stock of the shotgun splintered - I personally find alliteration jarring, but anyway the sibilant effect isn't one you want in an action scene, when it should be hard sounds as much as possible.

The look in his eyes told me - why is he looking behind to check on what the Wilde's eyes are saying, instead of running forward?

but at this point - I'm always wary of using 'this' in past tense. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but not here I think; 'that point' is better.

I fell back onto my back - repetition of 'back' very ungainly. You do it again at the very end as well.

Tony, you idiot! Get out of here! There's a problem with putting thoughts into the narrative without at the same time using quotation marks or italics -- for a second we're thrust into present tense without knowing why. I can't say I found it hugely disruptive but it jarred. The same with Regenerate that, motherf****r!

My neck refused to look behind me - I know I have eyes in the back of my head but... This needs re-wording for obvious reasons.

The damn thing isn’t loaded - lurch into present tense. Ditto Bless that little rodent. This doesn't help the immediacy of the piece, quie the contrary.

more like life itself oozed out of me - 'oozing' both to echo the first part of the sentence and because otherwise you'd need a 'it was' or something there.

words would not form - almost an exact repetition of something you wrote a few paras earlier.

Darkness came - if darkness came, how is it he carries on talking for another two sentences? This should be the last thing you write in this section.


As you can see most of the things I've picked up are minor, though I should say I've not been as thorough as I could have been, and there are other bits and pieces I could pick if I had the time to do it. The whole piece certainly feels less of a draft than the other excerpt you posted, but for all that, there's a lack of polish. It isn't that it feels rough, just not quite finished enough, somehow. Sorry that sounds so vague.

You don't have that laid-back 'this is all just a game' feel as in the other piece, but I can't pretend either that I was particularly gripped and reading it with bated breath. But then, as I said, I don't like fight scenes, so you'd better wait for someone else to give an opinion on that.

The dialogue read well but I'm in two minds about it. As dialogue it was fine, and it was realistic, but I'm not sure as to whether it was right to put it here. I can see the intention, you want a moment out of the battle to shed a tear for a dying friend, but neither of them wants to resort to mawkishness. But... I'm not convinced it's the right thing to do. I think it's the kind of thing that works better on the screen than on the page, because in a film you can still hear the fight, possibly see things happening, even as we are watching the friend die. Here there is no indication the fight is continuing at all and I was surprised anyone else was there with them in the room when suddenly you tell us the werewolf has killed Carlos - presumably in utter silence! I think it might be an idea to write another two versions of this. The first with her dying almost as he gets there so there is virtually no dialogue at all; the second with the dialogue but having him conscious of the werewolf-Carlos fight at the same time. Run those past any critique partners you have and see what they think.

Another point on the dying friend, in a film we'd get the requisite slushy music to let us know this is terribly sad. Here his emotion just isn't made clear enough. Two sideways approaches to telling us he's crying, and a 'moment to notice' a battle raging round him, and that's it. Granted we're missing out in not knowing how close she was to him because we haven't see the rest, but it's still not a lot to go on. I know you don't want floods of weeping, but some feeling of loss, grief, whatever, is necessary I think, no matter how stoical you want him to appear.

Again, I'm sorry this is coming over so negative. I think you have got something here, but it needs to be polished a lot more before it's ready for agents and the like. But you've obviously got the talent to do it, so don't be disheartened. It's just a question of plugging away at it.

J

 

[Xelah]

Feel free to be negative. I'm not fishing for compliments. Utter frustration with my real life critique group is what's brought me here. There, my work implies that I weigh the same as a duck and I don't get a lot of useful feedback. There's been more red ink spilled over two submissions here than I got from the critique group before I quit going.

As for scrounging, yeah here that can also mean scraping up what's left of something (ie scraping the bottom of the barrel). Color vs colour - linguistics again; words don't usually end in -our here.

About my description of crying, this is more a character choice. American lit has a tradition of unreliable narrators, most famously in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the tax documents I get every year from the IRS. There are points when it is obvious that my narrator is not telling the truth. The reader would be able to pick this out, but the narrator insists that how he's telling it is so. This usually occurs any time that my narrator is either hiding, crying, or running away. In short, my narrator is insecure.

About the present tense, I didn't notice that wasn't in italics in the forum post. I didn't even think to check really. I've got italics in the document. I usually use that to interrupt the unreliability and show what he's actually thinking, often when he's got no control over his emotions.

 

[Window Bar]

hiya Xelah--

The world you're building sounds fascinating.

Rather than doing an in-depth review, I'll limit my comments to the single improvement I believe is most important.

Tighten, then tighten some more. Here's a feel for the tightening game, using only the first paragraph:
Consider "I hobbled over to where Claire had fallen."

The context already has her down, so the "fallen" part can go. We already know it's Claire, so "her" can be used instead. So minimal tightening would be "I hobbled over to her."

But the "I hobbled" language puts the narrator into the position of reporting on his own bodily actions, which is rarely interesting to the reader--so I'd drop that too. Voila! Nothing left. Here's a rebuild:

"Willing myself to rise atop the pain, I saw Claire crash into the ticket counter, blood soaking her jeans. Up close, the wound was a meager centimeter, no more. But the rhythmic fountain from her femoral artery warned me she had very little time."

Okay, that's 44 words as opposed to the original 62. It may be a bit purple, but you can change that. Mostly, you'll energize the reader if you can move things along.

Keep on typing! -- WB

 

[chrispenycate]

Trying to psych myself up for this; the trouble is that when I said "we" I really meant "they". I do the simple stuff: grammar, punctuation, some logic and homophones, and leave the sophisticated style work to those somewhat less myopic; I'm too trees, not forest enough. Besides, my personal style is certainly not something anyone else would want to emulate.

Apart from wondering about the fact that, for a tourniquet for a femoral artery you need to tie a hard knot in the piece of cloth that drives into the vessel, and tighten it up with a bit of stick or a pencil twisted into it, not merely try and tie it tight enough. (Mind you, that first aid course was forty five years ago, and nobody's been kind enough to give me experience in it. And it was based round humans, not shape-changers, who add a whole new dimension of problems to paramedicine.)

So, the first two paragraphs have too many adjacent sentences which start "I did something or another" Yes, I am aware this is not really the beginning, so, by here, you've already either captured the reader's attention, or lost it, so using a repetitive sentence structure is probably not
A bit of problem with tenses. You're writing in conventional past tense, then:

The big Wilde killed Claire. Then it killed Carlos. Now it was going to kill me.

is effectively in present, while

He couldn’t manage much more than a trot because of the damage I did to his ankle.

it is "the damage I had done", before the described point.

It must have drank the tequila and crawled into her purse."

"it must have drunk…"

Teeth sunk into my shoulder.

Sank. I dr/sink, I dr/sank, I was dr/sunk.

as he readied to put a foot through Tony’s throat

This is probably a British/USA thing, but I would need an object (probably "himself") to "readied".

And thanks, Judge, for taking it on first.

 

[Xelah]

@wb
Thanks, that's helpful.

@cc
Apart from wondering about the fact that, for a tourniquet for a femoral artery you need to tie a hard knot in the piece of cloth that drives into the vessel, and tighten it up with a bit of stick or a pencil twisted into it, not merely try and tie it tight enough. (Mind you, that first aid course was forty five years ago, and nobody's been kind enough to give me experience in it. And it was based round humans, not shape-changers, who add a whole new dimension of problems to paramedicine.)

Hence why she doesn't stop bleeding... and dies.

 

[The Judge]

Very good advice from Window Bar, Xelah, and I'm kicking myself I didn't mention it. But I'm like Chris - very much a close detail person rather than a dealer in big concepts.

Don't know what to suggest as you've been so disappointed with the critique group, because they are invaluable when they are properly run. Just keep looking, I suppose. Or start one from scratch yourself -- you just need one other person and with today's technology you needn't even be in the same area. In the meantime, carry on posting odd bits here and we'll do what we can to help.

Good luck

J

PS No problems, Chris -- my talons needed the exercise!