Hello!

On Thu, 04 Mar 1999 05:56:15   Cutter Kinseeker wrote:

This is my first post to the FFML. Please don't flame me.

No worries!  Just some friendly C&C.  (sorry for taking
so long though... ^_^;;)

Chapter One
At Home and Abroad

	It was a quiet, peaceful day in the Tendo household. 

[snip several paragraphs]

Unless you're writing for an audience not familiar with 
the Ranma characters, I'd make the entire beginning of 
this fic an awful lot shorter.  A couple of lines, 
perhaps, instead of almost ten paragraphs.  

To tell the truth, I had to literally drag my eyes 
across the paragraphs and force myself to read them.  
It's not that they were badly written (they weren't); 
it was just that there was absolutely nothing new 
there, nothing I hadn't read before in at least a dozen 
fics.  And I haven't even been reading Ranma fics for 
all that long (only a few months).  It just went on and 
on, character after character.  I almost stopped 
reading your story because of this. 

If you really want to put descriptions of all the Ranma 
characters in your fic, I wouldn't do it at the very 
beginning.  I'd start the fic with a more interesting 
scene, such as right when Nabiki gets the phone call, 
and describe the other characters in the third scene, 
when Nabiki's announcing the trip to America.

	Akane's father, Soun, was doing his absolute best to enjoy the quiet. 
He and his best friend, Genma Saotome, Ranma's father, were whiling away 
the hours in much the same way as they always did, quiet or otherwise: 
playing shogii and cheating mercilessly. This cheating ranged from the 
sublimely subtle ("Oh, my, is it lunchtime already?") to the vastly 
obvious ("Look! It's Gojira!"), but it was always by an unspoken mutual 
consent. The old friends were so familiar with one another's fighting 
styles--indeed, with one another's cheating styles--that constant 
cheating on both of their parts was the only way to finish a game in 
under a week.

I did like this paragraph though (mainly because of the 
Gojira comment ^_^)

[snip]

***

	It was a quiet, peaceful day in Sunnydale. For many places, such a day 
might be seen as normal, or even dull. For Buffy Summers and her closest 
friends, a quiet day was anything but normal, and peace had become such 
a rare commodity that it could never be dull. But any place as inclined 
to violent confrontation as Sunnydale quickly became inured to it; the 
inhabitants, being the survivors that they were, rapidly adapted to the 
violence, even came to regard it as normal.
	So, on this peaceful day in early autumn, a day that felt like deep 
summer, Buffy Summers (and her eternal compatriots, the Slayerettes) 

?_?  Is this term actually used in the show?  (I don't 
know; I didn't always pay too close attention while 
watching it)  "Slayerettes" somehow makes me think of a 
group of dancing girls (like the Rockettes or 
something...)

saw 
the quiet not as a respite from all of the insanity of the past two 
years, but rather as the calm before the storm. Most of the other 
inhabitants of Sunnydale, knowing the propensity for strangeness 
(especially physically dangerous strangeness) that seemed to center 
around their ostensibly normal town, wisely stayed indoors. The general 
consensus was that it was only a matter of time before something 
catastrophic happened; just because there were no mysterious and 
unexplained deaths *now*, didn't mean there wouldn't be some *later*, as 
seemed to occur so often in this area of Southern California.

Again, I think there's just a bit too much description 
of just how normal things are.  This intro could be cut 
down by about a paragraph, which would make it a more 
exciting read.

[snip]

	As Giles plotted and planned, the people whose social life he was 
currently organizing walked into the library. Through the fog of his 
deep thinking, he could clearly hear Xander Harris, the resident clown 
of the Slayerettes, amusing the group with some tale or another. His 
body on auto-pilot, putting books back in their proper places, Giles 
picked up one of Xander's louder comments.
	"Guys, I don't know if you've noticed, but--it's been really boring 
this last week. I mean, not one vampire, not one demon, not one attempt 
to destroy the world... I'm starting to get a little lagged."
	"I like the quiet," piped up Xander's best friend, Willow Rosenberg, 
not nearly as timid as she had been two years before. Giles was 
privately proud of her progress, especially in the mystic arts. "It's 
kind of... quiet."
	"Thanks for the astute observation," sneered snotty Cordelia Chase, 
Xander's sometime love interest and more often hated foe. Giles' 
admiration of Willow was compounded by the constant sniping the more 
popular girl felt compelled to aim at the younger redhead. Willow wisely 
let the comment slide.
	"I think it's a nice change of pace," inserted the mellow tones of 
Willow's boyfriend, Oz--Giles started slightly as he realized that he 
didn't know Oz's last name. "Sure, it's a little dull, but it's peaceful 
too. The peace and quiet isn't a bad thing... taken in moderation, of 
course."
	"I agree with Xander," inserted the center of the group's 
activity--Buffy Summers, the Slayer. "It's dull, dull, dull. Oh, 
yeah--did I mention that it's dull?"

The way you've introduced the Buffy characters here is, 
IMHO, much more interesting than the way you introduced 
the Ranma characters earlier: it's interspersed with 
dialogue, and a major element in the plot has already 
been brought up.  

[snip the next scene or two]

Overall, this fic is well written in terms of grammar 
and spelling.  What I'd do now is tighten it up and cut 
out unnecessary bits (especially at the very beginning, 
since that's the most important part of any fic), so 
that you catch hold of your readers' interest early on, 
and maintain that interest throughout the fic.  

Megan Jones                   bwerith@mac-addict.com
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/4728/index.html
Does Lina Inverse ever get banned for flaming?  ^_~


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