On Thursday I'll post links to download, at no charge, Kindle, epub, and PDF versions of the book. I will continue to offer the books for free and you'll find links here, but Thursday is the official launch day.
I hope you'll stop by.
Ray
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Flog a BookBubber 41: Michael Reisig
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the first chapter of Somewhere on the Road to Key West.
Fleeting silver clouds whisked across the night sky, blanketing a glowering, orange moon as it rose over the Mocho Mountains of Jamaica. Early evening mists swirled around leaf and bough as the shrill cries of jungle creatures pierced the silence, a wild cacophony of warning, indignant and frightened. They could hear them coming. And so could we.
Angry shouts sliced through the primeval forest. I could just begin to see the bobbles of light — torches cleaving in and out of the dark foliage, dancing like lightning bugs in the distance, forming a semicircle around us.
“Things were going so well — so well! And then you! You!” I grunted as we fought our way along the barely discernable path, clawing at the vines and broad leaves that threatened our passage and clutched at us like spurned lovers. “His daughter of all people — the second largest drug lord in Jamaica and you have to boff his daughter!”
As he stumbled along beside me on the darkening trail, my partner dipped a shoulder in an aggravated shrug. “How did I know she was his daughter? I thought she was his girlfriend.”
“Oh, that makes it much better. You’re a freaking idiot! You really are.”
Will shook his head, inadvertently running his hand through his long, blond hair. “Jeez, Kansas! You saw the ‘come-hither’ looks she was giving us — like a mink in heat! Hell, it wasn’t even my idea. She dragged me off to her little hut of ill repute while you were telling him (snip)
This book averaged 4.4 stars on Amazon. I had mixed feelings about this one. It’s pretty well written, though my spellchecker tells me that “discernable” should be “discernible.” There’s good action, the voice is fine, we have conflict . . . yet, and it may just be this morning , I just didn’t find myself caring enough to turn the page. What did you think? You can turn the page here.
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey
Flogometer for Tony—are you compelled to turn the page?
Submissions needed, none in the queue. If you’d like a fresh look at your opening chapter or prologue, please email your submission to me re the directions at the bottom of this post.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.
Download a free PDF copy here.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of this list before submitting to the Flogometer. I use it on my own work.
A First-page Checklist
- It begins to engage the reader with the character
- Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
- The character desires something.
- The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
- There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
- It happens in the NOW of the story.
- Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Caveat: a first page can succeed without including all of these possibilities. They are simply tools you can use. In particular, a strong first-person voice with the right content can raise powerful story questions and a create page turn without doing all of the above. On the other hand, testing pages with the checklist no matter where they are in a story can help identify where a narrative lags and why it does.
Tony sends the first chapter of Blood of the Conquistadors.. The rest of the submission follows the break.
It took nine-year-old David McCready a few seconds to wake one Saturday morning in early October. A tinge of blue filled his bedroom as the morning sunlight filtered through his curtains. Only his slippers sat on the floor by his bed. Those strange arms that he saw last night reaching outward weren’t there now. Like the other times, he wanted to forget what he saw. He rolled out of bed and sprinted to his closet to get dressed. While putting on his pants, he crouched to see if anything was under his bed. After he stood up, he felt better. The T-shirt he chose would dictate his life for the next few hours. It was black, with the white skull and crossbones occupying the front. He’d been looking forward to this.
Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirate of the Caribbean series was David’s hero. This morning David took on that persona in search of the treasure hidden at the top of Devil’s Mountain. For young David, the top of Devil’s Mountain was the second floor of the Dorado Hotel where his family lived. David’s imagination was without bounds, but occasionally, his imagination and reality met causing frightening events.
Right after eating Reese’s Puff cereal from his favorite blue bowl, he set in with character. He named his sword Thunderstrike, and he whipped the pretend blade all about, vanquishing any pirates who came between him and the treasure. He started in the kitchen defeating two pirates simultaneously, then backed out into the short hallway next to the large (snip)
While it may seem normal to begin a story with someone waking up, it has become a clichéd way to start a story. If you are going to start with a wake-up, the story had better start right then and there, and with vigor.
But here we have an allusion to something creepy, but we’re not certain whether it was real or imagination. And then we’re off to the story of a boy getting up, pretending to be a pirate, and eating breakfast. Whatever story question was raised by the “strange arms” is pretty much abandoned.
The chapter goes on to show creepiness in the basement and his sister’s troubles with that. Still, nothing actually happens to either of them. He has breakfast, she does the laundry. This narrative starts way too far in advance of something happening to one of these kids that amounts to trouble that they have to deal with. Look later for your first chapter.
For what it’s worth.
Ray
Submitting to the Flogometer:
Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):
- your title
- your complete 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter
- Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ. Note: I’m adding a copyright notice for the writer at the end of the post. I’ll use just the first name unless I’m told I can use the full name.
- Also, please tell me if it’s okay to post the rest of the chapter so people can turn the page.
- And, optionally, include your permission to use it as an example in a book on writing craft if that's okay.
- If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
- If you rewrite while you wait for your turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of the first-page checklist before submitting to the Flogometer.
Flogging the Quill © 2016 Ray Rhamey, chapter © 2016 by Tony
Continue reading "Flogometer for Tony—are you compelled to turn the page?" »
Flog a BookBubber 40: Melissa F. Miller
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the first chapter of Irreparable Harm (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller Book 1).
The old man checked his new gold watch, given in appreciation for his fifty years of service to the City of Pittsburgh. He lifted the window screen and pressed his head against the oval window in the side of the plane. The glass was cold against his papery skin. Somewhere, out in the darkness, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia rose up from the land. He looked hard but couldn’t see them.
He pulled the screen back down, more sharply than he’d intended, and glanced over at his seatmates. They didn’t react to the noise. Next to him, sat a thin, college-aged girl who had squeezed herself into the middle seat, jammed her earbuds into her ears, and closed her eyes, lost in her music; beside her, a businessman, mid-level management, no higher, judging by the wrinkled suit and battered briefcase. Like a good business traveler, he used the flight to catch up on his sleep. His head lolled back on the headrest and his leg dangled into the aisle.
The man coughed into his fist and remembered the last time he had flown. It had been almost ten years. His youngest daughter and her husband, the struggling actor, had flown him and his wife out to Los Angeles to be there for the birth of their first child— his fourth grandchild, but the first girl. Maya had entered the world squealing, and, at least based on the weekly phone calls he had with her mother, it seemed she hadn’t ever stopped. He chuckled to himself at the thought and immediately felt his eyes well up. He blinked and twisted the thin gold (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow. You can turn the page here.
This book averaged 4.4 stars on Amazon. Full disclosure: I read this as a Bookbub book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it and the protagonist. I went on to get a second book in the series and liked it as well.
But what about this opening? Well, not much going on here, is there? A man is flying in an airplane and reminiscing. And here we see what happens if a little too much setup is on the first page. Much of this could have come later, and that would have been a good thing because, if done well, the following riveting paragraphs could have been on the first page and guaranteed a page-turn.
. . . he checked his watch again, fumbled with the smartphone on his lap, squinted at it to confirm the coordinates were correct, and hit SEND. Then Angelo Calvaruso sat back, closed his eyes, and relaxed— completely relaxed— for the first time in weeks.
Two minutes later, Hemisphere Air Flight No. 1667, a Boeing 737 en route from Washington National to Dallas-Fort Worth International, slammed into the side of a mountain at full speed and exploded in a fiery wave of metal and burning flesh.
Now that earns a page-turn from me.
What do you think?
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey
If it doesn’t happen, why is it there?
Having no floggees in the queue, I thought to look this morning for another Bookbubber to flog. I found a candidate, but a line on the first page has sent me off into a rant. Besides, after some nice writing, the protagonist decided to go off into a memory-lane trip into his teenage backstory. Ho-hum.
The story opens with a man musing (be still my heart!) and then he says (actual dialogue removed to conceal the author):
“Yada, yada,” he said out loud, not realizing he had done so.
We’re supposedly in deep, close, limited third-person point of view. In that point of view, the only things that can be in the narrative is what the character can normally see, hear, taste, feel, think, do, or know.
A thing that a character CANNOT know is something that DOES NOT HAPPEN. In this POV, the narrative is supposed to be delivering the experience of the character. How about you? Have you ever experienced something that didn't happen, that did not exist? Of course not. Nor should nothing be included in the experience of the character.
In this case, and in many cases I’ve edited, the narrative tells us of something that does not happen. He does not realize something.
So why the *$@! is it there? It has NO impact on the story or characterization. A waste of words.
Here’s another example from the chapter on POV from Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. This, too, is from a published novel.
Smith felt his head go light. Unaware of the action, he moved his free hand over his heart and clutched at his breast.
For my money, any limited point of view means writing ONLY about what the character perceives, does, feels, says, etc. If he or she doesn’t perceive it, it doesn’t belong in that portion of the narrative. If this character is unaware of what the hand is doing, it should not be included. More than that, does the lack of awareness affect the story? In this story, absolutely not.
What would work in this case? It’s simple:
Smith felt his head go light, and he clutched at his heart.
Just something to be aware of and watch out for in your stories.
Hey, want a fresh eye for your story’s opening? Send it here for a critique.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.
Download a free PDF copy here.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of this list before submitting to the Flogometer. I use it on my own work.
A First-page Checklist
- It begins to engage the reader with the character
- Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
- The character desires something.
- The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
- There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
- It happens in the NOW of the story.
- Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Caveat: a first page can succeed without including all of these possibilities. They are simply tools you can use. In particular, a strong first-person voice with the right content can raise powerful story questions and a create page turn without doing all of the above. On the other hand, testing pages with the checklist no matter where they are in a story can help identify where a narrative lags and why it does.
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey
Showing and telling revisited
There seems to be a dearth of people who want their chapters flogged, so I thought I'd include a "lesson" from Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling--maybe trouble with that is stalling submissions. Anyway, here goes.
In a recent edit, I pointed out instances where I felt my client was telling versus showing. Even though I included examples of ways to show what she had told, she wrote to me and said, “I’m not sure I know how to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.”
I can understand why. After all, we use the telling mode all the time in conversations with friends, and it works.
“I was really surprised.”
“I was so pissed.”
“I was incredibly happy.”
When to tell
There are times in a novel when telling is the right thing to do. It’s when you need to summarize an event because to create a scene for it would be wrong in terms of pace, tension, etc. A common example is when you’ve shown an event in an earlier scene and then the story comes to a place where your character needs to pass along what happened to another character. Rather than drag your reader blow by blow through something she already knows, you just summarize:
April told May how June had told Julie where to shove her opinion.
That’s a necessary and effective use of telling.
There are other times when it’s the best thing to do. For example, when what needs to happen is so mundane that to waste words on it is to waste words. For example, a character is talking on his cell phone. When he finishes the conversation, you could show this:
Bob pressed the little blue phone icon on his cell-phone keypad to end the call.
Truly, that wasn’t needed and smacks of overwriting. Instead:
Bob ended the call.
The reader can easily imagine ending a call with a cell phone if they’ve ever used one, and even if they haven’t used one, they’ve seen it on television.
So what’s so bad about a lot of telling in a novel? You “tell” a story, right? Not really. In a novel you dramatize with scenes. When you’re writing for effect, you craft words that create a very specific result in the reader’s mind, a vital sense of what is happening. You can only do that through showing.
Your readers want what they read to trigger in them the sights and sounds and smells of what’s happening in the story. They don’t want approximations, they don’t want a report, they want to experience the story’s reality.
How to show
You spot telling by looking for declarative sentences that tell the reader something. The verb “was” is often a sign of a telling statement.
Showing is using behavior (action, speech, thoughts) to illustrate or dramatize what the character is feeling/doing.
Here are looks at telling versus showing that come from actual writing samples.
The scene: Anna is beat from a long, bad day at work and now she’s spent hours at the hospital with her father, who has been unconscious for days. You want to give the reader Anna’s physical and emotional condition. This author wrote:
Anna was physically and mentally exhausted.
Sure, you get information. You have an intellectual understanding of her condition. But you have no feeling for what Anna feels like, do you? To show that Anna is physically and mentally exhausted, you could write this:
All Anna wanted to do was crawl into bed and go to sleep. But first she would cry. She didn’t think she could be calm and composed for another minute.
The scene continues: Anna’s father suddenly wakes and thrashes around wildly, gasping, making monitors go wild. You want to give the reader Anna’s reaction. The author told us this:
Anna was frightened.
She could have shown us with:
Oh, God, what was happening? “Dad?” Why didn’t he respond? “Nurse, do something!”
Yes, it takes more words, but remember that here you’re not trying to inform the reader but to deliver an experience.
As you go through your manuscript, whenever you come across a “was-type” declarative sentence that simply delivers information rather than shows behavior, you probably have an instance of telling.
Your task then is to visualize the character in that state or situation. See the movie. As the author, you can also “hear” thoughts. Then show the reader the thinking or speaking or moving in a way that illustrates what the reader needs to know.
Another example, one that deals with the use of adverbs.
Telling: He stabbed the man furiously.
See how an adverb tells rather than shows?
Showing: He plunged the dagger into the man’s chest again and again and again, screaming “Die!” each time the blade stabbed into flesh.
One more example. Jesse has been working for hours under the Texas sun. We need to let the reader know how he feels.
Telling: Jesse was very hot.
Seriously, I see descriptions like that in manuscripts all the time. How about this?
Showing: Jesse felt like an overcooked chicken, his meat damn near ready to fall off his bones.
Now, that’s hot. Another thing I often see is where a writer does a good job of showing, but then feels compelled to add an explanation (telling). From a recent edit:
He wrenched her from the quicksand with a last huge pull and fell back onto the ground, panting as if he’d just won a wrestling match, temporarily drained by the supreme effort.
For my money, “as if he’d just won a wrestling match, temporarily drained by the supreme effort” has already been shown by his panting and the effort he put into the rescue, so it’s redundant and repetitive. I would delete it.
Boiled down to essentials:
- Telling is dispensing information.
- Showing is evoking experience.
With each word and phrase you write, slip into reader mode and see what the effect is: is it just informing you, or bringing to life what the character experiences?
For what it’s worth
Ray
© 2011 Ray Rhamey
Flog a BookBubber 39: Lea O’Harra
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the prologue of Imperfect Strangers.
The instruments of murder were assembled on the bed. Most were items of clothing, bought the day before at the local shops.
Objects innocuous enough, inspiring thoughts of working in a garden and making things grow, rather than purchases for plans to make someone die.
It was shortly after dawn. Outside, despite the early hour, Mother Nature was engaged in a stunning display of strength, unleashing her fecundity with every tool at her disposal. If the scene were filmed in slow motion, it would show the frenzy of activity as flowers, bushes, shrubs, trees, grass and weeds writhed, twisted and pushed. All were in the grip of an irresistible power that urged the budding and blossoming of life.
One item stood out among the things displayed on the thin white summer blanket. It lay between a hat and a pair of trousers on the bed. It was a little knife, brand-new, its blade shining brightly in the shaft of sunlight slanting down from the open window. It had a black handle. It was the type of utensil to be found in any Japanese kitchen for peeling fruit and vegetables.
This knife had a different purpose. It would be used to slice through the soft, flabby neck muscle of a certain middle-aged individual.
Would the victim squeal? Like a pig feeling the sharp cutting tool at its throat? The would-be murderer picked up the would-be murder weapon and gently stroked the blade.
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow. You can turn the page here.
This book averaged a strong 4.5 stars on Amazon and, if the storytelling holds up to the quality of the writing, it’s deserved. I think I’ll be reading this one. There’s a hint that this takes place in Japan (it does), and a story in a new world to me is appealing. The one thing I would have suggested as an editor would be to trim the long paragraph describing what Mother Nature was doing. I suspect it has nothing to do with the story, and would rather have kept going with what’s happening in that bedroom.
What do you think?
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey
A major publisher tells us what they want from your first page
Penguin Random House has an article titled “What Our Editors Look for on an Opening Page.” It’s worth a read to get an insight into how publishing editors view the first page. Some highlights:
- A powerful opener: The power of an opening line or paragraph cannot be overstated.
- Unique perspective: Books that highlight (your story’s) uniqueness right from the outset stand out.
- A well-realized world: “One thing our editors look for is immediate access to the world that readers will be living in for the next few hundred pages—through description, character interaction, or dialogue.”
- Voice: using the example of the opening lines from The Martian, “A fresh, new voice can command a reader’s attention, and it will do the same for our editors.”
- Attention-grabbing characters: they can start on page one.
The article concludes with this: “. . . when the first page successfully blows an editor away, it can keep them invested throughout the project and make them even more excited to fight for you and your book.”
So what are you waiting for—get fresh eyes on your first page by sending it to FtQ for a flogging.
Ray
© 2016 Ray Rhamey
Flogometer for Jeff—are you compelled to turn the page?
Submissions needed, none in the queue. If you’d like a fresh look at your opening chapter or prologue, please email your submission to me re the directions at the bottom of this post.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.
Download a free PDF copy here.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of this list before submitting to the Flogometer. I use it on my own work.
A First-page Checklist
- It begins to engage the reader with the character
- Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
- The character desires something.
- The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
- There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
- It happens in the NOW of the story.
- Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
- The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Caveat: a first page can succeed without including all of these possibilities. They are simply tools you can use. In particular, a strong first-person voice with the right content can raise powerful story questions and a create page turn without doing all of the above. On the other hand, testing pages with the checklist no matter where they are in a story can help identify where a narrative lags and why it does.
Jeff sends the first chapter of Memory Cascades.. The rest of the submission follows the break.
She screamed. They had drugged her heavily. Her metabolic response resisted and to their surprise, it had the opposite effect. She bit, scratched, slugged, growled and hissed. She tail slapped one, and made a bruised mess of the others, but eventually they managed to restrain her. They put enough polyitheanine in her to sedate a horse before she succumbed. Hours later, she awakened alone and face down in a padded room bound up in a straight jacket, screaming and crying, knowing what they were going to do to her. She struggled against her restraints and was in the middle of a long despairing howl when someone opened the hatch of her cell and stepped in. She gasped, held her breath and froze, wide eyed with terror. The hatch closed quietly and she sensed the footsteps as they approached. She cried out and struggled to move. Then she felt a warm hand through the fabric in the middle of her back.
“Sh-sh-sh-shhhh . . . Aishwarya,” he whispered. “It’s me.”
She rolled over to see a homely face, a slim lanky frame, an overly generous nose and a pair of bright fluorescent emerald green eyes reflecting in the trifling light of the cell. He was clothed in a stealth suit. His thinning grey and brown hair poked out from beneath a sensory and communications helmet.
“Muh . . . Michael! Michael! My husband! My lovely, wonderful husband!” She squirmed against her restraints attempting to sit up closer to him.
For me, this was a dramatic scene and promised an interesting story ahead. The reference to “tail-slapped” (it should be hyphenated) was a good clue to her different nature, but I think the opening would be stronger if there were one more clue that she is a dolphin woman. Notes:</p>
She Aishwarya screamed. They had drugged her heavily. Her metabolic response resisted and to their surprise, it had the opposite effect. She bit, scratched, slugged, growled and hissed. She tail-slapped one, and made a bruised mess of the others, but eventually they managed to restrain her. They put enough polyitheanine in her to sedate a horse before she succumbed. Giving a name helps a character be a specific person, which can help with reader identification. I cut the part about drugging her because the narrative tells us that they do that when she fights. More active this way.
Hours later, she awakened alone and face down in a padded room, bound up in a straightjacket straight jacket., She screamed and criedscreaming and crying, knowing what they were going to do to her. She struggled against her restraints and was in the middle of a long despairing howl when someone opened the hatch of her cell and stepped in. She gasped, held her breath and froze, wide-eyed with terror. The hatch closed quietly and she sensed the footsteps approaching as they approached. She cried out and struggled to move. Then she felt a warm hand through the fabric in the middle of her back. Created a paragraph break to transition to the later time. I don’t think you can awaken screaming and crying, the waking has to come first. I think it would be better to include some of what they’re going to do to her—the fact that she knows doesn’t mean much if the reader doesn’t. Make the threat/jeopardy real instead of a vague reference.
“Sh-sh-sh-shhhh . . . Aishwarya,” he whispered. “It’s me.”
She rolled over to see a homely face, a slim lanky frame, an overly generous nose and a pair of bright fluorescent emerald green eyes reflecting in the trifling light of the cell. He was clothed in a stealth suit. His thinning grey and brown hair poked out from beneath a sensory and communications helmet.
“Muh . . . Michael! Michael! My husband! My lovely, wonderful husband!” She squirmed against her restraints attempting to sit up closer to him.
For what it’s worth.
Ray
Submitting to the Flogometer:
Email the following in an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf preferred, no PDFs):
- your title
- your complete 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter
- Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ. Note: I’m adding a copyright notice for the writer at the end of the post. I’ll use just the first name unless I’m told I can use the full name.
- Also, please tell me if it’s okay to post the rest of the chapter so people can turn the page.
- And, optionally, include your permission to use it as an example in a book on writing craft if that's okay.
- If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
- If you rewrite while you wait for your turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of the first-page checklist before submitting to the Flogometer.
Flogging the Quill © 2016 Ray Rhamey, prologue and chapter © 2016 by Jeff
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