“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)

Blood Line, Ch. 1-2

by Michael Keyton

Coming in to the second book of a trilogy is always a challenge.  It’s clear that the first book has established a rich, magical world co-existing with our own, and that Elizabeth and Elsie have already been through a lot.  These opening chapters have some vivid, unusual descriptions of magic, such as the description of Jack’s vision–“Figures moved, stick-like and flat”–the blood going into Elsie’s mouth even though she closed it, and the silverfish burrowing for information.  The magic also seems to have some interesting rules, such as the difficulty of it working over water.  The fact that Emma can rummage through Elsie’s mind while she’s knocked out and gain information from Elsie against her will is disturbing.

Judging just based on these chapters and not on anything in the first book of the trilogy, I think the opening of this second book could be improved in several ways.  As a reader, I’m not finding myself grabbed by any of the characters so far.  They seem to be kind of standard, familiar characters so far.  If I knew and loved them from Book 1, I might feel differently.  But with this as my introduction to the characters, I’m not pulled in.  The main issue, I think, is that both Elizabeth and Elsie are reactive rather than active characters.  Elizabeth seems to have no strong goal in this opening scene.  Wanting to see if her flowers are at the funeral doesn’t seem like a strong goal.  If Gwyneth would disapprove of the ceremony, then why would Elizabeth care if her flowers were there or not?  Since Gwyneth wouldn’t care about the flowers, it seems like Elizabeth wants the flowers to be there to thumb her nose at the other mourners.  Yet the other mourners don’t seem to notice, and she hides herself, so her actions have no consequence and she seems to have achieved nothing.  So her actions seem unimportant.  I would like her much more if she had a clear goal she had to struggle to try to achieve.   She would be more active and her actions would have consequences (she’d either achieve her goal or not).   For example, she might want a pin that she gave to Gwyneth as a keepsake, so she might approach a family member at the funeral to ask for it.  Or maybe she wants to slip something into the coffin for Gwyneth to remember her by.  Then she could struggle to achieve that, and I could get involved, and she could succeed or fail.  Right now, I’m just watching a girl watch a funeral, and that’s all pretty passive.  The only thing of consequence that happens is Elsie being kidnapped, and that is unrelated to Elizabeth’s actions.  So both Elizabeth and Elsie are victims, and Elizabeth simply reacts to the kidnapping rather than driving the actions.  This makes me feel that the author is manipulating events rather than that the character is driving the story.

In Elizabeth’s second scene, Grey seems to be in charge and Elizabeth is simply doing what he tells her.  She doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what to do on her own, and there’s no conflict between her and Grey.  Elizabeth might have her own goal, somewhat different from Grey’s, or she might have a different method she thinks they should use to find Elsie, so she’s not passive and reactive but is instead fighting for what she wants.  For example, perhaps Elizabeth tries to book a ship on her phone in case they miss the one with Elsie in it, and Grey could argue that’s not a good idea for whatever reason.  I’m not sure why this particular scene is included in the book at all, since it doesn’t show them missing the boat, which would be the exciting part, and the part that shows something of significance changing for Elizabeth and Grey.  As it is, that scene merely provides information; it doesn’t show a change of significance for Elizabeth.  Each scene in a story or novel should show something of significance changing for the main character of that scene.  This scene, if you shifted it to showing them arriving at the Port Authority and finding the ship already gone, would show Elizabeth going from having hope to losing hope.

Similarly, Elsie is mainly reactive.  She is reacting first to Emma and then to Emma and Jack.  I don’t feel her having any goal of her own that she’s struggling to achieve.  She doesn’t try to attend the funeral despite Elizabeth telling her to stay in the car.  She doesn’t try to escape.  She doesn’t try to avoid the needle or to focus her mind on some other memory.  She’s mainly a victim reacting to what others do.  I like it when she swivels her mind to try to hide the information Emma wants, but for me, that’s not enough to make Elsie a compelling, dynamic character.  Because of that, I can’t really care about her and can’t get pulled into the novel.

Another area in which I think these chapters can be improved is point of view.  The chapters seem to be trying for a third-person, limited-omniscient viewpoint, but they often drift out of the viewpoint character’s head.  In Chapter 1, we’re in Elizabeth’s POV.   We learn that smiling is “the last thing she wanted to do,” which is fine and establishes we’re in her head.  Yet in the next paragraph, we’re told “Elsie was younger than her,” which is not something Elizabeth would think.  Elizabeth already knows this.  This is what I call an “As you know, self,” when the POV character thinks something to herself that she already knows.  People don’t really think like this, so it undermines both POV and character when an author does this.  I understand the author is trying to get information to the reader, but instead of having the character think  the fact, the character should have some reaction to the fact.  For example, Elizabeth could think, “With her hair in braids, she looked even younger than thirteen.”

Another POV problem occurs two sentences later, with “Both sisters had inherited their mother’s raven black hair.”  Elizabeth wouldn’t think of herself and Elsie as “both sisters.”  This is the voice of an omniscient narrator commenting on both of them.  To stay in Elizabeth’s head, this would need to be rephrased;  for example, “Elsie had the same raven black hair Elizabeth did.”  This, and the following descriptions of their eyes raise another POV issue.  Would Elizabeth, at this moment, be noticing their hair color and eye color?  We’re actually told that no, she wouldn’t–“Elizabeth barely registered them”–in which case those details shouldn’t be given in her POV.  For a characters POV to be strong, it’s really important to limit description to those details the POV character would notice–most likely because they concern her and relate to a goal she’s trying to achieve.  Further, these details need to be described in the way that the POV character would think of them.  So if Elizabeth’s goal is to slip something into the casket for Gwyneth to remember her by, she’s going to be noticing who is near the casket and whether she has a chance to slip past them.  She’s not going to be noticing other things.  Strengthening the POV in this way will also strengthen the character and allow us to feel the character’s goal more intensely.

A final area I’d like to discuss is the characters’ emotions.  For readers to feel what the characters are feeling, emotions generally need to be shown and not told.  Any word that labels an emotion (helpless, unease, fear, bothered, horror are some I see in the chapter) is telling the reader that emotion rather than showing it.  One way to show emotions is through the character’s internal lifesigns, such as a pounding heart or a catch of the breath.  These things should be used sparingly, and it’s good to try to find fresh ways to say them, since they’ve been used a lot by authors.  Other ways of showing emotions are through actions, dialogue, reactions from other characters, objects/setting/appearance, thoughts, viewpoint, style, symbols, and similes/metaphors.  Since I discussed POV above, let me go into that a little more.  Using some of the techniques I discussed above to keep the POV close to the viewpoint character can help convey the character’s emotions.  If the viewpoint is close to the POV character, everything she thinks and sees will be colored by her emotions (rose-colored glasses).  She will notice details that reinforce her worldview and emotional state. For example, if you have a character who loves a city, she will notice all the great things about it and describe things in a positive way, and that will reveal her emotions.  If you have a character who hates the city, she will notice the bad things about it, and describe things in a negative way, revealing her negative feelings.  Everything the viewpoint character notices can help to reveal her emotional state through how she describes it.  Developing this more could make the story more intense and involving, and make the reader feel closer to the characters as well.

You’ve set up a very interesting magical world that carries many dangers for your protagonists.  I hope my comments are helpful.

Jeanne Cavelos–editor, author, director of Odyssey