The comments about the other effort got me thinking, am I producing flat writing at present???
This is the first bit of chapter three, well the bit I am fairly satisfied with. Is it using a differetn POV, and thus is perhaps harsher, but is it in keeping with the story.
http://www.sffworld.com/community/story/2251p0.html
That one's great. Very atmospheric and totally consistent. That's how you sound when you're good. It reads as if the story pulled you forward. Editing will mainly be a matter of punctuation and typos.
Compare the first paragraphs, for example. (I put comments into square brackets and bolded what the comments are about):
Coot's pass said:
It had been a mistake to discharge the pistol in the cave, but he could not [tense?] get his victim to budge from the supposed rendezvous. [unspecific1] Colliridge shook his head trying to clear the wooliness. [unspecific2] If any of Fetroll's [the victim? a leader responsible for the victim?] people were on his trail he doubted he would hear them, best keep his eyes doubly peeled. Not that Colliridge expected any would be tailing him, but there was always an off chance that one of the lesser chieftains had gotten curious and come up, [unspecific3] risking Fetroll's displeasure. A knife would have been better, less risk, but his employer [unspecific4] needed Fetroll to be found with a lump of lead made in Timeholm in his heart. [clunky]
Now, not all of the unspecifics are bad; but there's so little to balance them that I don't get into the paragraph. It's mostly information, but it's vague information.
unspecific1: "supposed rendezvous". So someone (Colliridge) met with Fetroll in a cave? Was Colliridge part of the "supposed" rendezvous, or had he come in place of another? If the former, why wouldn't Fetroll budge? If the letter, why should he? A lot of questions there, some of which you may not want to answer, but answering none leaves the reader with little to pay attention to.
unspecific2: what wooliness? I suspect you're referring to Colliridge's "what-might-have-been" thoughts, but since he just fired a gun in a cave he could be feeling generally "wooly", a bit dazed by gunsmoke in a closed room in combination with echo. I still think it's the former, though.
unspecific3: The sentence in itself is actually a quite clever way to introduce both setting and Fetroll's status. (would have more impact if I was certain, at that point, that Fetroll was the victim, though.) Anyway, the unspecificness here concerns the "up" in "come up". Up where? Does this have anything to do with the rendezvous? Up here? Or do the lesser Chieftains live further down the mountains, and they're just generally in the vicinity?
unspecific4: Well, that one's just marked for completeness, as you really shouldn't make this any more specific at this point.
Add to that the implicit unspecificness of the setting. A cave; well, what kind of cave? Big? Small? Culturally significant? Lived in? Obscure?
We have little to go on; we don't get a sense of setting.
Another thing I want to point out is that your punctuation seems to make sense in this one. Obviously, this isn't a flaw, but I think it's significant. Remember it for now.
Hand of Glory said:
"Bloody Officer's tart," Albert rasped, as he hobbled away into the dark. The pit of his stomach was on fire, he felt as if his gonads had been driven up into his chest. Damn that, bend-over-for-officers, Corporal. The maze of bobbing lights surrounding the convoy soon faded. He stumbled against a wooden cross. Albert had run into the crude cemetery that lay to the east of the main dressing station. He fell to his knees on the damp earth mound, his right hand resting on the arm of the cross.
See how sentences flow one into the other here? There's a lot going on and little information.
Also, notice how you make a comma between two sentences, instead of a fullstop (or possibly a semicolon)? (...fire, he...) Notice how you enclosed an adjectival construction that modifies a noun inbetween comma? (..., bend-over..., Corporal: it's equivalent to: damn that, stupid, corporal).
I think what's happening is that, when you're on a roll you lose control of punctuation; it's the downside of producing good text, it seems to me (but it's easier to fix punctuation than to invigorate a text, so it's not that bad, really).
From that I speculate (but I might be wrong) that you didn't really get into the Coot's Pass scene while writing. Perhaps your imagination is tied up with Hand of Glory? Or perhaps you're focussing too much on plot with that one? Or perhaps you just had a bad day?
Don't let your inner weasel bloat itself on that other scene. Hand of Glory remains great prose.
).
Maybe my imagination is tied up too much with HofG and I should stick with that.. In fact I have started to day dream scenes, not done that with anything since I was writing the first draft of Oracle, nearly 18 months, 2 years ago
