McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

I already feel the love, Teaser/rough. Comments accepted

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Flashand:
Here goes this is just a rough/teaser and i need some help with fine tuning. I have roughly 30k words and have been turned down once :(, but not on this one.
::::
I awoke, I shouldn’t have. That’s the kicker, I shouldn’t have survived the blast. The area around me for two hundred feet was nothing but charred remains of people trees and  whatever that thing was. I don’t want to remember why I was here, hell I don’t want to remember anything that happened, but I did. I am an enforcer to the Council of wizards, well that’s the long version the short version being I was one of the fourteen strongest wizards on the planet. From the looks of it I had just moved up a notch or two on that scale, and there were only at most thirteen of us now.

I shook my unruly long brown hair out of my eyes it was a few inches shorter thanks to the flames. I crawled up onto one elbow an looked around the area and I was horrified.

Eight of the most powerful mages in the North America had assembled and we were discussing how to remove some of the most powerful crime lords and their politicians. Then thirteen other wizards showed up, one even had nice legs. I noticed that when she tried to kick my head off.

Slowly I came up onto my hands and knees, my head pounded like a drum. I had never used so much magic in my life. After I blasted through leg’s shields and made her a corpse, this thing materialized and started taking out everyone. After it killed four mages indiscriminately and started towards another of the enemy we all pounded it out of existence, and when it went everything went blank.

I thought I was as dead as Carmen over there, her flesh slumping into the white residue good wizards left behind on death. It did help however that I wore an illegal rhino hide trench coat loaded with enough magical and physical protections to stop a phantom train. Even as I thought that the damn thing fell off me into pieces. As I stood up I noticed the other charms that I had, had all crumbled to dust as well.  I was mad as hell now, it had taken most of my adult life to come up with those things, not to mention the cost for the items and the time to gather the regents to create them.

belial.1980:
Interesting. I'm intrigued. Honestly though, I think it would be more effective if you described the attack outright rather than the fallout. I wouldn't worry about the narrative about the mages' political agenda at this point. I think readers would really be pulled in if you started your first sentence describing the slathering monster coming towards the narrator.

Show. Don't tell. As cliche' as this sounds I think it's sound advice. (I'm only echoing it from much, much better writers than myself.) Remember that the human being has 5 senses. Is there a lingering smell of the blast? What about the dead bodies? (Or the residue that the good wizards turn into) How does the character's body feel? Sore? Numb? After using so much magic do his arms feel limp or achy? Are there car alarms or sirens in the background? Can he taste blood or gravel or dust in his mouth?

As a reader, I feel like quite a bit of information has come my way in regard to the character's station as one of the most powerful wizards on the planet, the Council of wizards, their political plans, etc.

Yes, the readers want to know this, but I don't necessarily think it needs to come in the first few paragraphs. I read a really good paragraph on characterization. (Can't recall who wrote it, sorry) But the writer said that meeting the main character is a bit like dating. You want to eventually know the character through and through and fall in love with him or her, but, just like with dating a person in real life, it's best to unveil bits and pieces and get to know them at a comfortable rate. I felt like this intro slapped a lot of information down in my lap. Just for my own personal tastes, I'd slow it down a bit. Reveal bits and pieces through dialouge, flashbacks, etc. Gradually indoctrinate your reader into your world.

Think about Storm Front. You find out that Harry's a wizard very early on, but the White Council, the soul gaze, etc. and other things are gradually revealed in the first few chapters.

That being said, I think you've got a good premise and it sounds like there's some interesting stuff going on. I hope my comments have been helpful to you. Good luck!


 

LizW65:
Ditto much of what Belial said.  Also, from a purely technical standpoint:  watch your tenses!  Specifically, a couple of transitions between past and present tense, espeically in paragraph 2, sound awkward.  It can help smooth the transition by starting a new paragraph when you want to switch from past to present.

Flashand:
Thank you i appreciate the input and will address these things. :)


I shook my unruly long brown hair out of my eyes it was a few inches shorter thanks to the flames. That was a mistake my vision throbbed and pulsed as the world shifted to the beat of my heart. My brain attacking the insides of my skull with a pile driver.  I crawled up onto one elbow an looked around the area and I was horrified. I swallowed the bile and tried to make out the surrounding area once more, the smell of scorched flesh and burned trees wafting through the air.

:: a little better on feeling?


--- Quote from: LizW65 on June 05, 2009, 01:23:49 PM ---Ditto much of what Belial said.  Also, from a purely technical standpoint:  watch your tenses!  Specifically, a couple of transitions between past and present tense, espeically in paragraph 2, sound awkward.  It can help smooth the transition by starting a new paragraph when you want to switch from past to present.

--- End quote ---

AAACK no space oops my bad i see it thank you.

Flashand:
OK aftera little fidgeting and a lot of typos here is the new beginning and the fixes are posted above as noted above/ below whateva :P.
:::
The phone rang after a long night of attempting to create a new shield spell, one that would not only bleed off any excess heat or cold but absorb some of the energy from the spell being cast at it. I had almost gotten it to work the way I wanted, but I had gotten too tired to continue. A light headache made me grind my teeth a little as the klaxon of a phone rang again.

I stood and walked to the phone in the hallway, as the dang thing tended not to want to work for very long if it was in close proximity to me.

With a  mouth full of gravel, I answered it. “Hrello” my voice was normally slightly above a medium pitch far from being deep it is almost girlish.

“Rick? It’s Sam can you meet us somewhere we have been having problems and there is something big going down.” Samantha said in her overly sexy com hither voice.

She wanted something she always did, and I am a sucker I always fall for it. We dated fifty or sixty years ago, but that was then. She hadn’t like me pointing out to her that her drive to be on top was unhealthy at best. She has never been a powerful wizard, and she was a conniving wench, but she was almost always honest with me.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and pushed my long hair back over my shoulder, where it fell around the middle of my spine. I always slept natural, when I looked into the mirror across the hall I flinched at the scars on my chest. The scars were from a slide down a shale hillside a few years back . My spookily pale blue eyes looked tired, my sharp native features stuck out almost as much as my pride. Even though I was born albino and it took until I developed magic for my hair color to change to its light brown, my eye color remained the same. I stand around five foot nine and I weigh close to one seventy, I am not muscular in the powerhouse kind of way, but in the farm boy fashion built to go the long haul although I couldn’t beat a church mouse in a foot race.

Still a little out of it, “Sure k where?” I asked, the alarms in head blaring at me for some unknown reason.

“Hey take a shower and I will call you back in an hour alright?” Her voice snapped from the seductress to her normal no non sense.

“K see ya then.” I said with a yawn and hung up the phone. I looked at the phone starting to come awake, and all I could remember was that Sam had called. I shrugged trouble again, well its been thirty years since I have been in the thick of it, I don’t get out much as I hate to do stuff with magic that involved any thing that wasn’t inanimate. Very simply I believed that I might like causing damage too much, and that would be bad, very bad.

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