C&C is my opinion, blah blah you know the drill
I'll not be commenting on grammar and spelling and such; more on the
creative side than the technical.
On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 01:32:43PM -0700, C. Richard Davies wrote:
April 30, 1992
The house that has become the current locus of our awareness (227
Greenwood Avenue, incidentally) isn't particularly large. A rough square
perhaps forty-five feet on a side with off-white walls and a bright blue roof,
it has two floors and a driveway (but no garage) in which rests a single,
mid-size sedan.
I'm guessing that the purpose of this is to portray your typical
Americana. However, you start out with two things that make it less
strong an opening than it could have been. You use passive voice and
reference the reader, both of which are unnecessary. You could,
perhaps, start with something like this:
The paperboy, empty canvas bag dangling from one shoulder, slowly
cycled past 227 Greenwood Avenue on his way home. The squareish house
was rather unassuming -- off-white walls, with a bright blue roof and
some flowers out front the only splashes of color. It was a two-story
house, like most of its neighbors. A well-kept sedan rested in the
driveway.
You get the picture.
A large living/dining room, the kitchen, and a small office largely take
up the first floor. Right now, both of the active members of the household are
in the kitchen. Mother is humming gently as she fries eggs on the stovetop;
father sits at the small breakfast table and reads the morning newspaper.
At precisely 7:08:37, a small brown-haired tornado erupts from one of the
three bedrooms upstairs, streaks down the stairs and screeches to a halt by
hopping into a seat at the table opposite Father.
"MorningpoppamommacanIhavepeanutbutteronmytoast?"
"Good morning, Diane," replies Father, without setting down his paper.
Mother tsks. "Well, if you really want to mix peanut butter and fried
eggs, I won't stop you. But nobody's getting any disgusting combinations of
foods until Sam gets up."
"What?!? Hey, no, no fair! That won't be for another half-hour, Sam sleeps
like a rock, no fair!"
And here I thought that Usagi was a guy in this one, and Shingo a
girl...
Mary grumbles over the amount of history reading they've been assigned. "I
mean, does anyone care how Vancouver entered the Union? It was more than a
hundred years ago! Who cares about the ruddy economic history of ... of ... of
whatever it was called, back then --"
"British California," Sam supplies. "I've already gotten started."
>From this, I'm guessing that your point of divergence is much earlier
than WWII. Besides which, why would the city of Vancouver join by
itself?
_Prince Arn_, _Archie_, _Star Trek_, and Sam's personal favorite, _The
Avengers_. Even if it weren't the book that taught her to love reading, she'd
pick up this particular month's edition. It's set in Japan, and as the current
writer has shown a talent for presenting "exotic" locations realistically, Sam
is curious to see how she does with Sam's home state. She also considers
Japan is one state? Granted, all the Hawaiian islands are one state,
but Japan's a bit bigger... Unless, all of a sudden, Japan hasn't got
the population to be multiple states?
I mean, you have a VERY Americanized Japan, here. Either they've
forced all the Japanese people to adopt American ways, right down to
the personal names, or they simply wiped out most of the Japanese and
replaced them with Americans.
"All right," Sam sighs, and draws a deep breath before saying "Moon --"
And all at once, something is different. No, not a definable something,
but everything. Everything is more there, more solid, more real, as though
she'd been watching televideo and was suddenly there at the place it displayed.
It isn't just sight, but the scent of herself and the feel of the air around
her and the sound of her voice saying, "-- Prism --"
And it's different again, but now the difference is in her, as she feels
herself filling with energy, just as she does in the moment before the
starter's pistol fires. But the tension between her current state and the state
that she'll experience when the moment ends has never been greater, and yet not
a hint of this can be heard in the word "-- Power--"
And then her mind is all confusion and tumult, and for a terrible moment
she loses herself in the welter of possibilities that she can be, that she can
become, that she might have been. But then herself returns, or she finds it
again, even as the final words pass her lips. "-- Make-Up!"
And she explodes.
Or so it seems. For the first instant she wonders at the repetition of the
earlier loss, but then she realizes that what is gone is not herself, but any
sense of body -- and that this is what she imagined when she dreamed of flight.
Though she never imagined that she would be flying through skies of every color
and none, in a light warmer than the sun's but without any sensation of
burning.
This is a nice transformation sequence, but:
She comes to know, gradually, that she is not alone in this place, but
what is with her cannot be perceived save as a shadow or a reflection of her,
even though in observing it she feels that she is its shadow, its reflection.
She knows that it is waiting for her to ask a question, and she knows what it
must be.
"Who are you?"
"I am thy Truth. Unite with me."
The space is filled with music of the spheres as they become one.
This makes little sense, and though it's obviously intended to mean
something, I get nothing from it.
"I do not wear a swimsuit outside of a swimming pool, where no one can see
me but other girls! What *is* this thing?!"
Segregated swimming pools? The boys will be so upset.
The words are bubbling out of her mouth so quickly that she can barely
register them. "How dare you take this woman's seeming and abuse it so, to harm
the daughter that she loves. Were it within me, I would punish you with firey
torment, I would immure you in frigid ice, I would rain down thunder upon you,
I would make your name a half-forgotten memory. Yet these are not mine. All
that I may do is all that I shall do: I cast you out of this place, by light
of the Sun, and the warmth of the Earth, and by the Moon who is their daughter
-- but more, by the one behind them whose name we do not know. I cast you out.
BEGONE!"
And here is a VERY nice speech. Much better than "In the name of the
Moon, I'll punish you."
"You just ... stay the hell back," Mary says as she gets up from the floor
and slowly walks to the telephone on the wall, never taking her eyes off Sam
for a second. She quickly dials 411, and says in a voice that's gaining
Not 911?
"I don't believe this! I can't wander around looking like this --
especialy not now that there's an all-points bulletin with my description!"
Ooh, Sailor Moon wanted by the police!
----
Overall, very nice, though somewhat confusing. You're taking a free
hand with the history here, and we should probably be told what's
going on. I especially like Moon's speechmaking.
However... I won't be reading any more of this fic, for a simple
reason. Since the beginning of the year, I've been working on my OWN
fic involving Americanized Senshi and Americanized Japan. Certain
other people on this list can affirm that. I'm not going to run the
risk of "contamination", given how rabid the community can be about
plagiarism, even though our fics are going to be remarkably
different. So, until then, see ya and good luck.