"A Tale of Ill Fortune" - for beta
Heck with it, y'all can see it. And give an honest critique. Don't be kind.
All of this work:
(c)1989-2012 Dreia Melinkoff
( behind this cut )
All of this work:
(c)1989-2012 Dreia Melinkoff
( behind this cut )
Comments 5
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I see it - what that guy meant. A Fremen ship is boarded by Darth Vader after a failed cargo dump on Tatooine. And keeping track of who is who after that gets progressively difficult. (Why are there two lute players? Oop, no, one is a flute. Why not have him be playing chess? Unless Tanesh is deaf, he's going to know what Veh'ra D'Veen was doing before he got there - and was he summoned there? Why did he walk into his commander's office, and then be greeted?)
One thing would help a lot is to back off on the terminology.
“My apologies, Dan'ai,” he said softly, addressing Arjannu as “elder brother”.
Did he? Then why not just say,
“My apologies, Elder Brother,” he said softly.
That way we can keep track of which is a name and which is a title and which is neither, of these words that all start to blur together after a while.
It needs a good hard combing out, but it's not a bad story.
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Perhaps I could change the way that the Prefect's Hand agents are characterized.
The D'Veen is the major character in a huge amount of my work, and the flute is a part of his character. I'll keep that. I can get rid of Varmana's lute.
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The first part reads as much too stilted...change your narrative wording around. Your avoidance of contractions (normally a good thing) is making what is supposed to be *action* plod along. I'd suggest rewording, cutting out unnecessary description (the spaceship's crashing, no one will notice the slenderness of the navigator's hand, for example) and trying to convey the sense of urgency.
I have to run to class, but I'm putting down my placeholder for editing the rest of it, k?
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There are passages in the text where things are being described in a very disconnected, one-step-removed from personal experience manner. They aren't people's thoughts or speech, nor are they descriptions of what they see. They're more like backstory. This is OK as an introduction to a section, before you draw the reader into the events of the scene, but as soon as you introduce a character in a scene, it's better to make the text more vibrant, switching to active voice instead of passive voice, making description match either things you could experience yourself if you were present or things a character would be thinking at that moment.
One example would be when Arjannu is trying to pray but can't and thinks instead about the past two days. The purpose of the scene is to reveal backstory (what happened before he lost the shipment, and why it's more important to him than a mere monetary loss) and to set up an internal conflict (Arjannu struggles with whether or not he believes prayers and blessings work ( ... )
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