“Nightingale” by Elizabeth Prosper

ORIGIN OF HEART CH 1 PART A by Canace Silvering

I really enjoyed finding a chapter with a core friendship between women, especially seeing the potential there for that friendship to interact with plot in meaningful ways. What I’d like to see more of in this chapter is a shift in narration style to allow the characters and worldbuilding room to grow.

I spend so much time telling my students to be skeptical of listicle-style writing advice – “write what you know,” “show, don’t tell,” etc – that I’m often startled to encounter instances where those uncomplicated instructions apply. Shifting this piece’s narration style from telling to showing would go a long way towards improving it; in addition to helping the reader inhabit Eerika’s head, it could ground and enrich some of the worldbuilding details which presently feel like placeholders.

“Show, don’t tell” is usually tedious advice because it assumes that there can only be one true style of narration: spare, cinematic, seamless camera-work favoured over wordy thought-streams and scene-establishing. This is of course nonsense, and like any writing advice it should be treated as a tool among many in a writer’s toolbox, each better suited to a particular job. Maybe you want to have a wordy observing narrator, like Lemony Snicket in A Series of Unfortunate Events; maybe you want to play an interesting stylistic prose game like in Gormenghast; maybe you’re writing a story in a folkloric mode, with “it is said” and “once upon a time,”; maybe your narrator’s first-person and has a garrulous voice. There’s definitely a place for telling.

But that said, sometimes telling’s a hammer when what you want is a scalpel. Here’s an example of “telling” done poorly:

Susan was worried. She knew that if the bus didn’t arrive soon she’d be late for her interview,

and then she wouldn’t get the job which she needed very badly.

Here’s an example of conveying that same information via “showing”:

Susan stood at the bus stop, shifting her weight from foot to foot, reading and re-reading the timetable. After several minutes she pulled out her phone to call a cab – then sighed, and put the phone back in her pocket. She bit her lip and stared down the empty road without blinking until tears stung the corners of her eyes.

The second paragraph is doing a lot more work to evoke feelings of worry and anxiety in the reader. It invites the reader to empathise with what Susan’s experiencing without directly relating the details of her situation. Most people have experienced being worried, but there are a lot of flavours and textures of worry, so the explicit description is, ironically, vague and unspecific. On the other hand, most people have also experienced waiting for a bus that won’t turn up, and that’s much more likely to evoke the specific feelings of irritation, helplessness, worry, cost/benefit analyses and sunk-cost fallacies you want a reader to experience – much more than just saying “Susan was worried.”

With that in mind, let’s look at the three first paragraphs of your story and how they can be retooled with “showing” in mind.

Death and birth are two things that shouldn’t coincide, but on the day Eerika’s father died, she was elected as Fair Maiden, the one to lead the witches in Anima, the act of creation. She stood in line with seven other females, all wearing red, the color of spilled blood and running life. Today was a day of duality, of cycles.

 

“I nominate Eerika Born,” a girl called, raising her hand.

 

Dunstan, head Guardian, eyed the girl, hand clutching his carved staff tighter. His gaze swept past her, onto the other voters in the crowd. Eerika didn’t like it, not one bit. It wasn’t that she wanted power, and she secretly hoped that there would be an uproar of rejection, but she hated that everyone treated Chumani unfairly, as if her opinion didn’t matter just because she wasn’t called into Anicula like everyone else.

Here’s the information we’ve been given:

1. Eerika’s father died
2. Eerika’s been elected as Fair Maiden
3. Fair Maidens lead the witches in Anima
4. Anima is the act of creation
5. Eerika does not want to be Fair Maiden
6. Chumani’s looked down on
7. Eerika and Chumani are friends
8. They live in a place called Anicula

This is a pretty good balance of information for an opening chapter – but rather a lot of information to receive in the first three paragraphs. Shifting your style to show rather than tell that information would allow it to spread out and be conveyed more slowly and thoroughly through character actions and feelings over the course of the whole.

Here are a few different ways I can see this opening changed:

On the day Eerika’s father died, she stood in line with seven young women waiting to hear who would be elected Fair Maiden, the one to lead the witches in Anima, the act of creation.

OR

On the day Eerika’s father died, she was elected as Fair Maiden.

She didn’t want to be. Her palms sweated as she stood in line with seven other females, all wearing red, the color of spilled blood and running life.

You’d still need to reconcile the tense shift of “she was elected” with then witnessing the process of her being elected immediately afterwards, but there are many possible ways of doing that. Either way, I think beginning with “on the day Eerika’s father died” is much more striking than a musing about life and death that has no immediate emotional bearing on the characters. Perhaps Eerika can muse on that later on; perhaps she can see a pattern to embrace or condemn. But at the opening, we the readers should be grabbed by the fact that our protagonist has lost her father and has to endure an important ritual while grieving, rather than ponder a philosophical statement about death and birth.

(Also, death and birth frequently coincide, and there’s no “birth” in this chapter, unless you’re counting the election, which isn’t an intuitive leap to make – Eerika isn’t “born” Fair Maiden. So it’s even more muddling to begin with that line.)

Where worldbuilding is concerned, I’m left with several questions that Benjamin prompts.

• Why should should the fact that Jia ‘came in speaking tongues’ be unusual if everyone comes through the Veil from different places? Is there a language native to Anicula?
• Why is Benjamin nursing a 17-year-old grudge? How has admitting Chumani into their town affected him?
• If people can’t get through the Veil unless they’re “special,” why does it matter whether or not they were “called”?

Also, while I take your disclaimer about the loose European medievalism of the setting, you do still need to carefully consider what elements of that setting you’re sharing: I was thrown out of the story as soon as Eerika remembered that Jia is from “China,” since that’s a term more in use from the 16th century on, and depending on where in modern-day China Jia is from, she probably wouldn’t have introduced herself as “from China”.

To sum up: what you’ve got here is a good, strong relationship between two key characters, and at present the relationship’s full of promise; grounding these characters in their actions, motivations, and a more carefully curated setting will really help that relationship shine and develop.

—Amal El-Mohtar

Behold A Pale Rider by Christine Lucas

From its opening paragraphs, “Behold A Pale Rider” presents us with an engaging if not entirely successful attempt to crossbreed fantasy, light science fiction and very light horror tropes, telling the tale of how two witches and a former soldier try to punish the anthropomorphic representation of Death for failing to prevent humanity from unleashing a nanobot-driven zombie apocalypse.

The result is something that reads a bit like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman, full of startling and creatively grotesque imagery yet replete with slightly twee humour that rubs up uncomfortably against the genuine dramatic weight the author sometimes appears to be trying to evoke, creating a thematic dissonance which never really goes away.

On the one hand, we have Persa quoting songs from Mary Poppins while offering Death a cup of tea and calling him “dear,” while on the other, we have those moments where we get a glimpse behind Persa’s eccentric but genteel mask, like so:

Fifty fucking years. The sudden sob almost choked her. No, not now, that the end was almost near.

Starting with humour and going to pathos is a tricky thing for any writer to pull off, but building to it slowly always works better than pulling a sudden hairpin reversal, and this apparent inability to decide on an emotional tone lends the proceedings a satirical air, which in turn makes the story difficult for a reader to commit their entire emotional attention to.

It’s at least as jarring as the occasional slip from first person limited POV into universal third person POV, which happens here—

Di shoved the small parcel into Persa’s face and drew back her hand the second Persa got hold of the parcel. She unfolded the many layers of brown paper to reach the sugary goodness inside, then fixed her eyes on Death.

 

“One cube of sugar, dear? More?”

 

One, came the reply, after what seemed like a moment of hesitation. Had he suspected? No. How could he?

 

He was Death, after all. What—or who—could possibly harm Death?

One way to try and fix this issue would be to go back and rephrase things to make it clear that this is Persa observing Death and speculating about what he might be thinking, rather than us suddenly being able to peep inside Death’s head over Persa’s shoulder. Changing “Had he suspected?” to “Did he suspect?” would also help to both clarify what’s going on and make it more immediate/active. Similarly, I’d probably rewrite the very first part so that Di isn’t shoving the parcel of sugar into Persa’s face but rather her hand, surreptitiously, in such a way as to not alert Death to the fact that Di doesn’t want to touch it any longer than she has to, which means it’s probably a threat.

In terms of simple mechanical fixes, meanwhile, there’s a fair amount of similar repetition, passivity and overstuffing throughout that need to be smoothed away, while many paragraphs could be further clarified by breaking them up into separate sentence clusters that might then reveal places where the action and/or description could be elaborated upon. But there are also much larger issues which need to be clarified, especially in terms of the science fiction dystopia meets Biblical apocalypse back-story—the timeline gets a bit over-complicated, especially when juggling a universal “Panacea code” which hacked human beings’ system to cure all diseases with the development of an anti-Panacea code nanobot virus which killed people and then caused them to rise from the dead.

Here, for example, Death implies the nanobots were the result of a Singularity, ie that they arose “naturally” after machines developed artificial intelligence…

The Singularity had been estimated for after the Apocalypse, by the survivors, not before. The development of the nanobots was …unexpected. A twist of his thin lips, as if his tea had changed to vinegar. It came as no surprise that mankind managed to mess up their greatest achievement.

…but immediately afterwards, Di and Jackson go on to argue that the nanobot virus was released by human hackers, which would seem to cut the artificial intelligence part of the equation out. So the answer might be to basically pick one cause and stick to it.

However, I’d also like to point out that many of these instances only became clear to me on a second reading, because I was too caught up in the ghoulishly whimsical plot and very distinctive voice to entirely register them on my first trip around the narrative block, especially in sections such as these:

Death sprang to his feet, and rose with a burst of darkness over Persa’s couch, his snarl stretched wide over a fleshless, angular face. His human clothes ripped apart, his hoodie now great black wings, his denim writhing wrappings and swirling shroud. A maelstrom of shadows spiraled behind him, its center the gates of Hades and Purgatory and Hel and Sheol and countless realms of torture and despair. Skeletal hands reached out—out of the shadows, out of Persa’s couch and walls and ceiling and floor, tearing apart her house, her furniture, and reality itself.

 

Persa stood and composed herself. “Now, dear. That’s just rude.”

In conclusion, this is an entertaining and inventive story with a lot of merit, one which I think could be easily made submittable by careful editing and overall clarification of content.

–Gemma Files

“Blindness” by Dimitra Nikolaidu

“Blindness” caught my attention this month with its spare, Eastern European feel and its refreshing take on the beauty-oriented dystopia—its combination of the subtle and the grotesque.  While the core concept is ground that’s been covered in decades of genre fiction, “Blindness” feels hushed, urgent, and entirely fresh.  This month, I’d like to talk about how the small nuances of a piece can entirely make a difference to its reception, and how the perspective of a narrative can matter most.

The first strength “Blindness” has is its worldbuilding and prose. There’s a subtly suggested oppressiveness evoked by a very few details: the flower-faced women, the grey buildings packed close together, Plato’s grandmother’s blindness.  While its spare style is occasionally uneven, there’s great detail work done subtly and mostly by implication: Plato’s two broken fingers, badly healed, imply a great deal more violence simultaneous with illustrating his shuddering desire to forget that violence, and naming the constructed, official face “the bone flower” opens up entire worlds of potential awfulness.  The tone readers are left with is a grey, ominous landscape full of foreboding—and a tension that makes the stakes Plato and his allies are facing feel very immediate and real.

That nuance and subtlety recurs in the mystery’s solution, in the kind of art—homespun, humble, traditionally women’s art—that leads Plato to the key that might topple the regime.  It’s precisely the kinds of art that a regime that privileges certain kinds of beauty would overlook: a tapestry on a wall, a painting in a cave.  It makes the idea that they’ve yet to find that painting plausible, and stacked against a regime that’s made women faceless, it’s a bold statement delivered with a surprisingly soft touch.

The real strength in “Blindness” is seeing all those small details add up into significant plot developments.  Yellow’s betrayal is a surprise that isn’t quite surprising in all the right ways, as Plato’s addled memory combines with enough hints of subtle espionage to make the ways Yellow’s misled him fall into place.  There is perhaps, though, a balance to be struck in the scene where she’s misleading him, however, as Yellow and Plato’s debate on Wilde and beauty and history slows the story down, and perhaps feels a bit too much like an airing of the idea that inspired the story from beyond the fourth wall.  While it sets up her betrayal, and while I think it’s a good choice to create the solid distinction between how blunting the small irony hidden there—that Wilde did not have a wife he’d have cared about—there’s room there to perhaps tighten the scene and pick up the pace, ensuring that the story keeps moving even through the dump of ideas.

Overall, that’s the only point of suggestion I’d have for this piece: integrating its backstory and worldbuilding a little more tidily into the stream of the present-day narrative.  While the state of the Underground and his grandmother’s history with the floods are necessary pieces of the story, the paragraphs in which they’re presented stick out as the story stops to present the necessary data.  Incorporated more subtly, they’ll match the rest of the piece and maintain that organic, coherent feel.

I do want to turn some attention to the matter of which perspective a story is told from.  There’s a comment in a member review on this piece suggesting that Plato would function better as a woman, and that he already reads like a woman, mostly due to his possession and expression of emotions in internal narration. I’d like to take a minute to dispute that suggested point of craft: there’s a great narrative advantage to having Plato function on the outside of the system of facelessness that’s consumed his mother, grandmother, and allies.  “Blindness” would be a very different piece if narrated—and if Plato’s quest was undertaken—from inside that system, without a face, instead of outside it as someone who actualizes as a complete human being, and the major payoff of the story, the moment where he recognizes Manya’s full and complete and beautiful humanity in the portrait with her real face, would be utterly undermined, thus destroying the effectiveness of the story’s ending.

What makes “Blindness” work, really work, is Plato’s inherent recognition of the women in his life as human—a recognition that’s so fundamental he doesn’t even consider it, already understanding that women’s agency isn’t men’s decision—and the shock of empathy when he finds a way to validate that, like a key to a lock.  It is a visceral moment, when the man on the wall becomes a woman.  That moment—and Plato’s grandmother’s continuing disbelief that Manya would ever champion the bone flowers—make it believable to me, as a reader, that Manya-the-symbol could start a revolution, once anyone can recognize the difference between joy on her face and pain.

With that in mind, I’d caution members when giving—and receiving—feedback that one of the major components of characterization is the skill of seeing people as individuals, and writing characters who are individuals; it is always appropriate to be suspicious of feedback which states all members of a group do X, or none of them do.  There is always an individual who is an exception to that conjured rule, and if your character is that individual, it’s more worthwhile to spend one’s character-building time in making their choice to do X coherent and consistent with their full, three-dimensional personality.  Complexity makes for the most effective characterization, so long as those complex traits are recognizable as being part of the same unbroken personality.

Overall, “Blindness” is a stellar example of the way a fairly well-traveled concept—the dystopia based on looks—can be reinvented, reimagined, and delivered entirely new, with intensely worthwhile things to say in an engaging world.  And that’s largely because of who tells that story, despite not being at the centre of it or having the most skin in the game.  It’s Plato’s perspective that made this an interesting, haunted read for me, and it’s his perspective that brings, I think, something new to the subgenre.

Best of luck with the piece, and thanks for the read!

–Leah Bobet
Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

“The Hummingbirds” by Robert Wooldridge

It’s rare that I connect with work from the same author for two EC months in a row, but “The Hummingbirds” immediately caught and held my attention this month.  There’s a breath-held quality to both halves of the piece that makes Sublime’s awe and the feeling of the hummingbirds infectious, but I’m not entirely sure that this story is delivering, yet, on its promise.  So this month, I’d like to discuss consistency in working to the strengths of a piece, and how it important it is to carry our strongest pieces of craft cohesively through to the end.

“The Hummingbirds” starts with a beautiful, hushed portrait: a girl kneeling in prayer before a robot, religiously convinced it will rise.  It’s a magnificent scene, trading both on that elegant juxtaposition of genres and excellent voice work that makes great use of an oral storytelling cadence and a refrain—it will rise—that evokes folktales and preaching equally.  The cornerstone of the first scene, though, is its immediate tactility: fine-pointed dust on fine-pointed knees, temperature, light through boards, breath, sound.  The author’s proven adept at using sensory detail, and “Hummingbirds” takes advantage of this strength with the prohibition against looking at George’s ATS.  With ears and smells and implication alone, those few paragraphs build up a slight narrative suspense and pay it off in a way that feels natural—and makes the awakening of the ATS feel significant and profound.

That same skill is deployed into the second scene, as the same kind of casually thoughtful detail as how tightly sprung the ATS is, and George’s preference for older models gives a round, real organicness to his side of the story, and welds Sublime’s fantasy-style tropes and George’s SF-style tropes together in a way that doesn’t make them feel separate or disjunct.

However, that’s a strength that’s not pulled all the way through the piece, with the same careful attention, and there are multiple places that shows as “Hummingbirds” continues to its conclusion.

The first major issue that merits attention in “Hummingbirds” is pacing.  While there are many stretches where the fairly unadorned dialogue works, or where narrating over information is a good strategy, there are spots in “Hummingbirds” where that dialogue could use context, another beat, or a slight transition into a new scene—or where it might be more effective to break up that information dump and provide the information in real time.  The end of the second scene is a prime example of both, as the information crucial to George’s mission arrives divorced of any emotional or character context, and then the dialogue around Sublime’s appointment as guide falls flat for me, left without context, body language, or transitions.  In a piece with fairly careful attention to detail elsewhere, the lack of it sticks out significantly here.

That carefully-evoked worldbuilding is also missed as the story goes on.  I do have an appreciation for the way “Hummingbirds” subverts the trope of “no one ever said she was beautiful”, but an equal request to be mindful of how the story portrays Sublime’s desire to dress more sexually.  It’s presuming she’s dressing to be found sexual by someone else, and there’s an entire worldview about women and men that suggests that is not just untrue 99% of the time, but troubling.  It also brings up issues of practical worldbuilding: If Sublime can work her will to make things true, then why wouldn’t someone just have called her pretty, or presented her with more revealing clothes?  This seems to be code for “I am a teenage girl”—but a piece of code that forgets teenage girls are people.

I’m also a little surprised that George, given his job, is so undiplomatic with Villareal and so judgmental about the colony’s culture.  With colonies across space, and an Earth that doesn’t acknowledge rank, there must be some notion of cultural drift and how politeness mechanisms can differ even in smaller, local regions.  As a technician/soldier in a support role, who might be deployed anywhere, his aggression and dismissal seem deeply counterproductive, if not an outright attempt to manufacture conflict that never quite pays off, and diminished my engagement with the piece.

It’s odd to see that base attitude toward religion internalized in Sublime’s worldview, as well.  If religious faith is how she lives, and she knows it gets things done in her world, why would George’s question about doctors insult her, why would she need his approval, and why would she feel as if there’s anything to prove?

Ultimately, though, the main issue that merits attention for me is that in the second half, “Hummingbirds” gets a little lost: The discrepancies in the worldbuilding, versus how we’re being told the monster was caused and how it can be solved, add up until what the story says is happening and what I as a reader can see happening are two very different things.  As above, the revelation that the entire problem is Sublime working her will on reality isn’t quite set up, and there’s no reason dispatching the troll should cause her to stop believing things, just…perhaps be a little more responsible about what she believes.  If anything, the power of her faith has been confirmed.

Ultimately, this leaves me unsure as to what to do with “Hummingbirds”.  While the worldbuilding and craft are evocative, it’s perhaps not saying what it thinks it’s saying, and the core concept—each event leading to each—could perhaps use some attention, so they form into a cohesive picture that leaves something learned or experienced for the reader as well as Sublime and George.

Best of luck with the piece!

–Leah Bobet

Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)

Code of Warriors and Dragons (Chapter 1) by Kit Davis

This looks like a solid setup for an interesting, character-driven epic fantasy, that I expect will focus on the relationship between human and dragon, apprentice and teacher, and make those relationships the narrative engine of the rest of the work. As opening chapters go, this one has some classic first-draft, trying-to-get-into-the-story-while-figuring-it-out markers that are useful to address.

There’s a truism about opening paragraphs in first drafts: most of them can be cut, or substantially trimmed. So, let’s look at your opening paragraphs:

 The booted feet marching down the corridor awakened Tristan long before the castle guard reached his chambers. His heart took up the beat of the precisioned cadence thudding towards him. He flung back his covers and rolled out of bed.

Tristan’s young squire reached the door just as a weighted knock landed on its heavy oak exterior. Wide-eyed, the boy looked at Tristan.

Tristan nodded, giving his squire permission to open the door. The boy used both hands to pull back the locking bolt and heaved the door open. Tristan jerked on tousers and a tunic.

There’s a lot of excessive verbiage here cluttering up the work you’re trying to do. Why is it important to start with disembodied booted feet? Why spend all these words describing Tristan’s heartbeat in tandem with booted feet? (Listen to a heartbeat and listen to the sound of someone walking briskly down a hallway: unless this castle guard is blithely skipping down the corridors, these are not similar cadences.) If you want to show that Tristan’s a light sleeper who lives in a castle and has a squire, you can do that more effectively in fewer words, like this:

 Tristan woke to the thud of a castle guard’s booted feet in the corridor. His squire was already up and moving towards the door; Tristan nodded at him to open it while he jerked on trousers and a tunic.

What’s missing from my digestion of your paragraphs is a sense of why Tristan would respond to the sound of a castle guard in the corridor as an indication of danger, but that’s something easily added in; maybe the outside guards never come inside unless something serious is happening. Maybe Tristan hears armour clanking down the hall instead of boots. Either way, you want to move through these mechanical details as quickly as possible  in order to get to the character stuff which I can tell is where this story’s heart will be.

What I see you doing, in the opening as well as throughout the body of this chapter, is trying to pack as much information as possible into every sentence in order to bring the reader into your world: you want to get the world-building info-dump stuff out of the way so that you can move on to the chewier, more satisfying character drama. This is a laudable goal, but you’ll get there a lot more effectively by curating the information you’re giving you’re reader.

It may be useful to ask, what does your reader need to know? Then let the answers guide the way that you write the chapter. I think your readers need to know the following:

•  Tristan’s character, outlook, motivation
• This is a Western Europe Medievalish world with dragon-riders
• A dragon and rider have vanished
• A dragon has chosen Tristan to be a rider

We don’t get a whole lot of who Tristan is and what he wants; we can see that he’s dutiful, prompt when summoned, and disbelieving of the fact that he’s been chosen to be a rider, but these facts would be more effective if you establish his age and desire to be a rider earlier on (assuming he does want to be a rider). I think you can sacrifice some of the speed and urgency of your opening in order to spend a little more time inside Tristan’s head to get a sense of his motivation.

Overall, I think slowing the speed of events while tightening up the language you use to narrate them will give you the space you need to carefully build up the fantasy world around the core of dragon/rider dynamic that I look forward to reading more about.

Final Course by Gary Buller

When Aristotle advised starting in the middle of things, I’m not sure this is exactly what he had in mind, but “Final Course” begins in the middle of a horrific meal with participants forced to eat course after course of bugs, snakes, and other disgusting items.

The story throws us right into this situation and allows us to gradually figure out what’s going on:  four men captured and forced to eat or die for the entertainment of an audience on the dark web.  This is an interesting, high-stakes, and fun situation, Survivor gone bad.  Stakes are raised as Sam’s companions fall one by one and we realize there can be only one winner.  Obstacles grow worse as the courses become more difficult to eat.  My favorite part occurs when the master of ceremonies comes out and addresses the audience.

I think there are several ways the story could be improved, though.  Before Sam looks at his friends and fellow captives, all I know is that Sam is chained up and being served bugs.  I don’t know who Sam is, and I don’t know what’s at stake, so aside from mild curiosity, I’m not really involved in the story. As far as I know, he could be a murderer who deserves to eat bugs.  Or he could have chosen to participate.  I don’t know.  When he looks at his friends in the third scene, and all are chained, and one has been shot, then I understand that Sam’s life and his friends’ lives are at stake.  While I still don’t know them well, I can care more.  So I would suggest moving this from the third scene into the second scene.  For me, two instances in the first two scenes of bug eating by a character I don’t know for reasons I don’t know made me lose interest.  Once I saw his friends and understood more, I became more interested.

As the existence of his friends is withheld for the first two scenes, other information that Sam, the viewpoint character, knows is withheld.  This makes me feel manipulated and kind of cheated as a reader, since I’m in Sam’s head, but I don’t know what he knows.  I’m also thrown out of the story each time a new item appears.  For example, about 3/4ths of the way through the story we’re told there’s an LED clock on the table where Sam is sitting.  After that, we learn there’s the blinking red light from a video camera.  For me, the revelation of the situation (that he must eat each course within the time limit to stay alive, and people are watching via the dark web and betting on the results) is interesting, but isn’t enough to sustain the entire story.  I think the story would be stronger if we completely understood the situation by the 50% mark–by you revealing all of these things more quickly–and then the rest of the story could show Sam desperately trying to survive the situation.

I may be missing something, but I don’t understand how Sam wins the competition.  Sam’s friend, Daz, warns Sam not to talk, saying they could both be shot, but that doesn’t make sense to me.  Why would they be shot for talking?  Talking would make the event more entertaining, I would think.  No one has prohibited speaking, as far as I know.  In the next paragraph, “there was a single metallic click.”  I don’t know what this is.  It doesn’t sound like a gunshot.  If it is a gunshot, I would think Sam would look at Daz to see whether he is dead or not.  Or he would at least hear Daz’s head hitting the table, or his body falling, or something.  So I don’t interpret this as Daz being shot.  If anyone should be shot, it seems like it should be Sam, since he spoke first.  So if Daz is shot, that seems random, manipulated by the author, rather than happening for any strong reason.

I understand that the final course involves Sam eating a body part from Daz, but if Daz is alive, why is his body part cut off rather than Sam’s?  Cutting off Daz’s body part kills Daz, I believe, which makes Sam the winner by default–he doesn’t seem to earn the win.  Did Daz fail to eat the previous course?  We didn’t see that.  Were body parts cut off of both Sam and Daz?  I don’t think so.  So for me, the key part of the plot seems jumped over, and it seems Sam didn’t have to do anything especially good, bad, clever, or foolish to win.  That means the climax and ending lack significance.  I don’t know why he won.

I think we need to see Sam being more active and making a difficult decision, so Sam isn’t just acted upon by others but is making choices–or at least one choice, that shows us something about Sam and how this affects him.  My suggestion about what to do with the second half of the story, after you’ve revealed the situation, is to have Sam try several things to get out of his situation.  He could first try appealing to the master of ceremonies.  Once he knows people are watching, he could appeal to those watching, tell them something about himself to prove he doesn’t deserve to die.  Then he could threaten them, tell them his brother works for the CIA and will hunt them down.  He could try to get the nail holding the spider onto the plate and use it to attack a plate-carrier or to pick the lock on his cuffs.  When that fails, he might consider killing himself with it.  Finally he realizes this won’t go on forever.  It will only go on until there’s one person left, the winner.  So now he realizes he has to beat Daz.  He might start saying things to Daz to throw Daz off.  He might claim he’s having an affair with Daz’s wife, that Daz’s wife has contempt for him, or whatever.  When he says the one thing that would hurt Daz most, Daz might yell back at him, and that would cause him to fail to eat the item by the time limit, and Daz would be shot.  Then Sam would have to eat the final course, and then the ending as you have it could happen.  But what Sam did to win, and the way he feels about what he did, will provide the story with meaning that it currently lacks.

I’d just like to mention a few other things quickly.  The story tells quite a bit, and often showing would be more vivid and effective.  One particular area of telling is with emotions, using emotional labels like “terrifying,” “panic,” surprised,” “disgust,” “terror,” “horrible.”  Usually it’s more effective to show emotions through actions, dialogue, thoughts, and other methods.  The story also has quite a few run-on sentence, which cause me to stumble each time I read one.

I think you’ve set up a very interesting situation here in which we can see Sam driven to extremes.  I hope my comments are helpful.

–Jeanne Cavelos
Editor, author, director of Odyssey

“The Hangman’s Farewell” by Rhen Wilson

The story provides a nice twist on the plot of a hitman hired to kill a cheating wife.  In this case, the cheating wife is cheating with a demon, and the hitman finds himself out of his depth.  The story is also told in an unusual way, as an email written by the hitman to the client, ostensibly describing what happened, but actually serving as a ruse to keep the client at home until the demon can arrive to wreak vengeance.  These twists make the story a fun read.

I think there are several ways the story could be improved, though.  The voice is inconsistent and often quite jarring.  In first person, the voice of the narrator is extremely prominent and serves as a key method of revealing the narrator’s character.  Any author writing in first person needs to make sure the voice is distinctive, appropriate, and strong.  When the voice is inconsistent or feels inappropriate, that weakens the story.  At times, the voice sounds like that of a present-day, educated man:  “If you are reading this, then you saw my note and followed its instructions.”  At times, the voice sounds like a present-day, less educated man:  “he was screwing her brains out and she liked it. . . .  I know he’s schtupping your wife, but you have to admit he’s got class.” At times, the voice sounds like a very well-educated man from the past, possibly circa 1900:  “They knew, somehow, no word I uttered contained fictions. . . .  I explained in plain terms that I would leave a sign for you at a designated coffee shop.”  Because the voice is constantly shifting, I find it hard to believe in the character or settle into the story.  The voice makes me think he’s a demon himself or a vampire who has lived for hundreds of years and developed a very uneven voice.  I really don’t know who he is.  But he doesn’t seem like a believable hitman to me and isn’t someone I can have strong feelings about, positive or negative.

I think the character and emotion in the story might also be strengthened.  I feel curiosity as I read but very little suspense.  I think part of the reason is that the narrator conveys events in a distant, detached way.  I don’t feel strong emotions from him, such as fear, anger, or despair.  One of the moments where I would expect to feel the most emotion is his first glimpse of the demon in the shower:  “But when I opened the shower door, it was I who screamed in surprise.  I dropped the linen, stunned, and fell backward, hitting my head on the porcelain countertop opposite the shower.”  This is the viewpoint of someone very distant from the situation.  If we were experiencing this in the moment, we would get an image of what he sees when he opens the door and before he screams, since his scream is a reaction to what he screams.  Then we would feel his legs quiver and collapse, causing him to fall, and he’d be unaware of the material from which the countertop was made–he’d be too busy feeling the horrible pain of hitting something with his head.  As he writes this email, the hitman is distant in time from the events, looking back on them.  But for the reader to be involved, we need to forget about that, at least at key moments like this, and go through the action with the character.  So the voice, the choice of details, and the order of the details keeps me from feeling urgency, fear, and suspense.  I think another part of the problem is that the action shows the hitman to have poor skills, and once he sees the demon, he has no opportunity to fight back.  This prevents us from feeling much suspense.  The fact that the hitman seemingly arrives to kill the wife without a gun makes me think he’s not good at his job.  He also does a poor job of establishing surveillance on the target.  He listens through the wall, which is something I’d do, rather than hacking into her cell phone or using a hi-tech listening device or even watching the door to see if her lover leaves.  He seems foolish for thinking the lover has left the room when he hasn’t.  If he used good hitman procedures but the demon was able to overcome them, that would allow me to believe in the hitman more.  His plan to kill the lover in the shower seems unworkable and impractical to me.  If he had a stronger plan and was able to partially execute it before he was subdued, that would help.  Then if he worked out a last-ditch plan while being questioned by the demon, I could feel suspense over whether that would work or not.

A few things create confusion in the story.  I don’t know the hitman’s state at the end of the story, which is disappointing.  I was looking forward to finding out he was suffering some horrible fate, such as having his limbs chopped off and being kept alive in a suitcase while the demon travels to Paris.  If we are supposed to know his status at the end, then I missed it.  I’m also not sure why the hitman believes he email would bring the client home.  I understand that the client saw the sign in the window of the coffee shop and took that as a signal that his wife had been killed, but why does that mean it’s safe to go home?  Wouldn’t he think the lover (demon or not) might come after him?  And can’t he read the email on his phone?  I’m also confused by the use of the term hangman.  Reading the title and the first two paragraphs of the story, I thought it was set in the 1880s when hangmen were used.  This seems a consequence of the voice from the past.  The word hitman seems more appropriate.

I hope this is helpful.  I enjoyed the fresh elements you brought to this story.

–Jeanne Cavelos
Editor, author, director of Odyssey

Spellbreaker, Chapter 3 by Carolyn Mitchell

This looks like a promising fantasy procedural that could benefit from a good deal of sentence-level work in future drafts as well as a slower, more considered approach to its world-building.

First, to the author’s question:

I’m wondering if this chapter reads slow because it’s almost entirely my protagonist’s reactions to her investigation. 

The chapter does read a little slowly, but not because of your protagonist’s reactions – it’s because of the kind of sentence-level repetition that happens as a matter of course while we’re working ideas out on the page. Some of it is at the level of concepts – “visual image” towards the end of the chapter, for instance – but most of it is redundant diction that can be easily caught by reading it out loud.

Take this paragraph, for example – the word “door” occurs in literally every sentence:

Slowly, she walked over until she stood directly in front of the glimmering door. Knee-high ferns nestled up against the door on the other side with the rough bark of a tree partially obscuring the view. Looking through the door into the verdant forest beyond it, she could see vibrant colors of a spell pattern dancing in the air.  The translucent circle she could see on Daryl’s land must be an echo of the power used to cast the spell on the other side of the door.

Now consider the very next paragraph, but with “amulet”:

She thought back to the comments of Sheriff Cruz. This was no high school practice session. One of Daryl’s high end mage clients must be using this doorway. Daryl was renowned for his amulets, but he was also adamant about his privacy.  Her boss in Dallas had called Daryl when they found a box full of amulets on the Strickland case.  Daryl was incredibly helpful in deciphering the amulets, but only after her boss promised him he wouldn’t be revealed as a source for their investigation.  He was going to be pissed when he found out a mage was casting on his land without permission.

In both cases, the paragraphs’ main idea revolves around the repeated word – but the word is so distracting in its repetition that it overshadows the information the paragraph’s trying to convey. This happens throughout the chapter. Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem that can be fixed with pronouns alone; the paragraphs need to be restructured at the idea level and the chapter at the world-building level.

It’s possible that some world-building stakes have been established in the first two chapters, but I still had questions for this one: it didn’t make sense to me that mages would be allowed to police themselves unless they also had a hand in day-to-day policing. Is there a special mage-focused task-force made up of mages? If they are the top of a law-enforcement pyramid where magic’s concerned, that’s one thing – they can be corrupt, they can have factions, etc. But having a group of people that operate outside the law without exercising any control over the law confuses me. Why wouldn’t regular law enforcement want to curtail their power or their actions, if they’re the most powerful people around? Consider how common that question is in current pop culture where superheroes are concerned, for instance – it’ll definitely be on your readers’ minds.

In a situation like this, where your protagonist is working on conveying information about how the world works, it might be helpful to have the exposition delivered through conversation, allowing someone to ask the questions the reader has, or at least anticipate them with more information. It wouldn’t even have to change the action too much; a partner who stays on one side of the door while Charlene goes through, and to whom Charlene returns. “Where’s your badge?” this person might ask, just after Charlene’s explained how important it is that they get away from there before the mages get through…

But while that’s one possible solution, I don’t think it’s necessary; you can certainly keep Charlene solo in the scene. What you’d need to do, though, is approach the scene from a bird’s eye view: what do you want each paragraph to convey? What do you want the overall chapter to do? Referring to the two paragraphs excerpted above, I might take the following idea for each:

Paragraph 1: Charlene takes stock of the door and learns something from it.

 Paragraph 2: The kind of person Daryl is suggests he isn’t responsible for this door. 

In both cases, you’d then want the paragraph to convey this information as clearly and succinctly as possible in order to get to the threatening part of the scene.

That, by the way, is very well done! Once Charlene saw the mages I was very invested in what was happening. The chase, the escape, and the realization of how much more trouble she’s in when she thought she was safe are all engaging and effective. It’s the getting there that needs some re-tooling.

“The Aqueduct” by Robert Wooldridge

“The Aqueduct” intrigued me this month with its deft characterization, its quietly skillful voice work, and its structural ambition: a story shaped explicitly like its central symbol, passing the flow of the narrative from arch to arch, layering on perspectives and assumptions—and pulling out wider and wider as it goes.  The vision of aqueduct arches as black cats is gorgeous—unexpected and yet completely logical—and the idea of structuring a story where each character is a cat in the arch is truly interesting.

So this month, I’d like to talk about unity of narrative, and how to achieve it: whether it’s deriving a story from the same set of details, a single uniting symbol, or—as “The Aqueduct” does—both.

The first major strength of “The Aqueduct” is the attention being paid to the small details of the sentence-level work, and how those small details almost entirely build the world, characterization, and differing worldviews that the piece depends on to spin its kaleidoscope.  Most of the effects in “The Aqueduct” are grounded in the tiniest things: Morton’s short, simple syntax demonstrate his learning disabililty, his sophisticated metaphor and thought show without explaining that he’s much more perceptive than he’s considered, and the slow revelation that what looks like an act of violence is a trigger for comfort, a memory of praise and validation, primes readers early to look for the unexpected instead of the standard tropes throughout the story.  Cadr’s approved words—blood, salt, hard, bruises, ache, iron—compose an entire worldview.  Brennus’s view of everyone in networked relation to each other, of a village made of systems, dependent on the image of a queen with soft hands and a king who looks young and able, tells a quiet story about how fragile the kingdom is, built on its Roman ruins.

More notably, this technique applies visibly when looking at what each character sees when they look at the aqueduct—magic versus a symbol of Roman expulsion and Celtic resurgence versus a system so ordered it’s foreign in the chaos of Brennus’s kingdom; an aspiration.

Deriving the whole of a story from a single aspect of craft—sentence-level prose, in this case—is painstaking, but it’s an incredibly effective way to ensure that the end result feels united and cohesive.  There’s a great deal of consistency between the worldbuilding, characterization, thematics, and prose when they’re all being established by—or derived from—the same core craft element.  “The Aqueduct” feels unified and cohesive because of this attention: not like a collection of craft tools fitted together, but one organic organism, with each aspect of craft reinforcing the rest and underlining the overall significance of everything that happens here.

The second unifying aspect of “The Aqueduct” is right in the title, pointed out for readers to catch.  The aqueduct itself is set up as the central symbol for the story: a literalized metaphor for everything from the difference between the Roman and post-Roman Celtic societies, the structure of the story, the plot itself—the crumbling of Brennus’s kingdom—and the theme of the piece—”…if one crumbled, all fell because they leaned one upon the next. Like a village.”

The key to how and why the aqueduct works so beautifully as a central symbol is right in the above paragraph: It is a metaphor that works for almost every aspect of the story.  When each element of craft is like that one unifying symbol, each element is like every other.  The effect is a resonance, an almost hall-of-mirrors feeling, that makes a simple story feel cohesive, well-patterned, and full of depth.

If there’s a place for improvement in “The Aqueduct”, it’s length and pacing: the story mires in the middle, in Brennus’s section, when he collects his coterie.  After two relatively brief sections, Brennus’s is already longer, disrupting the already set-and-reinforced reader expectation, and even though it reflects Brennus’s social-oriented worldview, the pile of names starts to grow meaningless to me as a reader.

My suggestion would be a trim and streamline of the description of Brennus’s kingdom, to maintain the lean, plot-driven tone of “The Aqueduct” through its final act.  The implication tools that have sustained the worldbuilding throughout the piece to this point work well; I think they can stand here, too, without the additional reinforcement.  As well, I’d reconsider the efficacy of the goat thief/court proceedings paragraphs—while they reinforce the thematics, I’m wondering at this point what’s happening to Morton, Cadr, and the aqueduct, and it felt to me too much like an obstacle in the path of what the story has told me is interesting here.

I’d also suggest bearing in mind what the readers already know from previous point-of-view sections.  While it’s plot-logical for Cadr to explain his reasoning to Brennan, the readers are already aware of his worldview—we’ve seen it in his section—and the repetition brings a drag to the story right near the end, just when the pace and tension should be picking up steam ahead of the riot and the appearance of the dragon-bowed ship.

There are a lot of thoughts woven in here about individualism versus collective effort, perspective, confirmation bias, violence versus social cohesion, what constitutes strength after all.  However, I think their lines could be slightly cleaner and clearer, more sharply delineated.  “The Aqueduct” rewards close reading very well; if the ties between each craft element and the aqueduct symbol were a bit more on the surface—just a touch—it would likely do better with readers who value the more plot-oriented, accessible layers of a story.

Overall, “The Aqueduct” is a fascinating little experiment of a piece, one that’s densely woven and well-made.

Best of luck with it!

–Leah Bobet
Author of Above (2012) and An Inheritance of Ashes (October 2015)