jpalmer wrote:
Nabiki - New Horizons
Chapter 30 - Family Jewels
By: G.L. Sandborn
A new chapter?
Good on you mate.
As for me, I'm on some sort of spiritual 'no-fly-list' and every time I
try to sneak back into Nerima, I get turned away at the city limits. : (
Sounds like a gaijin thing. ^_^
It was a dark night in Honolulu Harbor. Thick clouds
covered the sky, obscuring the moon and trapping the soft lights
of the nearby city. Gentle trade winds kissed the waves lapping
at the side of a Japanese freighter tied up to Dock 11. The
aging, rusty tramp steamer, Mamazu Maru, rocked lightly at its
moorings. It had arrived earlier in the day with a small cargo
of bootleg Anime products from Hong Kong.
Two shadowy figures crept lightly along the shore-side deck,
hugging the bulkhead as they went. Pausing behind a crate of
CD's carelessly left behind, they eyed a lone guard posted at the
gangplank.
When I first read this, I had the oddest impression of Bulwer-Lytton (It was a dark and stormy night!), mixed with Hemingway.
I wasn't sure what bothered me until I re-formated it, one sentence per line:
1. >It was a dark night in Honolulu Harbor.
2. >Thick clouds covered the sky, obscuring the moon and trapping the
soft lights of the nearby city.
3. >Gentle trade winds kissed the waves lapping at the side of a
Japanese freighter tied up to Dock 11.
4. >The aging, rusty tramp steamer, Mamazu Maru, rocked lightly at its
moorings.
5. >It had arrived earlier in the day with a small cargo of bootleg
Anime products from Hong Kong.
There is nothing wrong with any of these sentences, but there is a
sameness of length in sentences 2 through 5 that produced an unexpected
cadence to the prose.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you had in mind. I
peeked back at a few of your other chapters to see if it was a repeating
structual theme,
but it kind of looks like a singularity.
I would suggest:
a) Drop sentence 1, and put the image of 'dark ' into #2, and replace
'nearby city' with 'Honolulu'.
b) Combine 3 & 4, to randomize the sentence lengths.
Excellent! You know, I've worked and worked on the other parts and
basically left the opening exactly as
I first wrote it (on a crowed flight, somewhere over the Pacific).
Still, I always wanted to do a 'It was a dark and stormy night' opening,
just to elicit groans from everyone. ^_^
Moving on...
Two shadowy figures crept lightly along the shore-side deck, hugging
the bulkhead as they went.
Pausing behind a crate of CD's carelessly left behind, they eyed a
lone guard posted at the gangplank.
The guard appeared bored with his duties and not very attentive.
Hey! Show me! Why did he look bored? Did he yawn? was he opening a pack
of cigarettes? Was he reading fanfiction?
More of a lack of editing. I didn't really do much to it until Cologne
and Shampoo were hiding from the squad car.
BTW, this is a sign of my using an outline before actually writing.
Sometimes, my outline just gets fleshed out a bit
and used in the story. [shrug] Bad habit, I know.
The older figure smiled at the prospects.
(They were stacked haphazardly next to a pallet of r-rated pencil
boards, perhaps? ^_^ )
When the guard turned his back to light another cigarette, the older
figure silently swept along the deck like a manta skimming the bottom of
the bay.
A jab in the right place and the guard slumped unconscious to the deck.
Quickly, the two scampered down the gangplank and into the shadows of
a large warehouse.
Woah. What just happend? It feels he story just started, as if I were sitting in a theater,
and up to this point, the screen was blank and someone was telling us the story, and now the
screen is suddenly lit in technicolor and the room is filled with Dolby 7.1!
Yup, this is where I started going back over and over again to polish
the story. Like I said, I practically ignored the opening.
(Bad, very bad.)
And that's the way I felt, reading the entore rest of this chapter. I really loved it.
I haven't been very good about doing C&C of late, and please don't take my comments about
paragraph 1 the wrong way. I plead the Alan Kay defense. (In reference to his remarks about the
Macintosh: "the Mac was the first computer worth criticizing.") I like this story, and your storytelling,
and I will not be upset if you ignore my C&C with a Gallic "phft!"
JP, I would NEVER take constructive criticism the wrong way. You have
always been a thoughtful and insightful reviewer. Because of that, I've
always taken
your suggestions to heart. If I ever got so thin-skinned as to take C&C
personally, I'd rather give up writing. A good writer can separate himself
from his story enough to look at it with a critical eye. Having another
set of eyes only makes it more likely to improve the final product.
Thank you.
P.S. You've inspried me to take another run at the gates. Thanks.
Tilt away at the windmills, Don. Sancho will be here to cheer you on.
As always, REALLY good to hear from you.
Stay well,
- Greg
J.
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