Critique #165 — Len Bains #1
Kevin Andrew Murphy August 31st, 2007
When you’ve time to consider how much hitting the ground is going to hurt, you’ve fallen way too far. Ingold was passing the tower’s third story when he remembered to start screaming. He hit the ground with force enough to bury him calf-deep had the courtyard not been stone-paved. His knees folded and hammered the slabs, followed in rapid succession by elbows and forehead. The lute in his hand became a splintered cloud.
“I thought he’d splat like a melon.” The guardsman hawked up a glob of gelatinous phlegm and angled it after Ingold, to the amusement of his fellows.
Three of the guards watched for a while longer, but a trickle of blood running from beneath the corpse’s head proved their only reward. At length they withdrew from the battlements to escape the thin rain.
Ingold’s return to consciousness began at his extremities. He emerged from oblivion by degrees. First, twitching fingers clutched at life. His arms flexed convulsively.
The legs shuddered, reluctant to stir. Green-gold eyes flicked open and, in the motion, admitted a whole world of pain. The depth of Ingold’s groan spoke his agony with all the eloquence one expects of a bard. He rolled to his back. The strengthening rain began to wash away the blood streaming from his nose. There should have been broken bones, but none were broken. Crushed flesh began to knit, each passing minute bringing with it a day’s healing.
The first paragraph is brilliant. After that, I had to re-read to stay with the action. Still, you’ve got a good start here. I’d personally cut a couple of descriptors (ie: gelatinous), but I do hope to read more of this sometime.
Keep up the good work!
J
Hey Len.
I liked this opening in general (though, I have to say, it’s not as good as your other submission), but here are some points on sentences and word-usage:
Loved the first sentence, but the second one isn’t quite as effective. More than that I can’t give you, I’m afraid.
‘He hit the ground with force enough to bury him calf-deep had the courtyard not been stone-paved’ - you need a ‘would’ in here somewhere, else the ‘had’ seems out of place. As it stands, I wanted to see ‘his the ground with what would have been enough force’, but I think that elongates the sentence a bit too much. You get the idea, though.
‘His knees folded and hammered the slabs’ - I’m not a fan of ‘hammered the slabs’, it doesn’t sound right. I think you need something like ‘hammered against’ or ‘hammered into’ [though frankly, I'd use another verb altogether]. Also, ‘folded’ is a very weak verb here - something like ‘buckled’ would have more impact. Also, ‘… followed in rapid succession by’ is a bit long for me - you’re emphasising the fact that first his feet [I presume] hit the floor, then his knees, and then his elbows and then his forehead, and in that order and no other so help me God. Is the order really that important, or would ‘followed swiftly by’ be just as good?
‘The lute in his hand became a splintered cloud’ - this image is a bit clichéd and cartoony. It seems to let the rest of the story down, somehow.
‘The guardsman hawked up a glob of gelatinous phlegm’ - small point, but I’d either change this to gelatinous glob or phlegm, or scrap ‘gelatinous’ altogether. There is no other kind of phlegm, as is there no other kind of globule; gelatinous is implicit.
Lastly, another small point, but I rather saw the end coming (the wolverine-esque super-fast-healing-dude miraculously surviving a fatal accident, since your main character apparently falls to his death straight away. That, and something about ‘I thought he’d splat’ seemed to give it away). There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but there you go.
Anyway, not bad, but your other one is in a completely different league to this.
Hope these comments helped :).
Daniel.
I liked it. I tripped a bit over hammered slabs (trying to figure out the image) though the sound of the words fit so well.
The only trip I had was those green-gold eyes opening, I was wondering who was seeing them. Though there is a narrator (reporting on the guards looking down at the supposed corpse and talking) we’re in Ingold’s POV as he begins to waken, so having to jump out just to see his eye color threw me.
And I loved the tiny clue in ‘remembered to scream’
That’s it–it’s wonderful otherwise.
Um, I think screaming is an involuntary reaction that would be immediate upon falling, not something that one would remember to do after the fall is already mostly over. I’m assuming from the previous sentence and the subsequent sentence that the tower is really, really tall and is at least a fifty story tower…though that doesn’t fit the time period you’re setting up. You see, I’ve jumped from a high tower (45 foot tall, if I remember correctly) at a lake swimming area, and it happened so fast that I didn’t have time to think of anything as complicated as “Wow, this is really going to hurt badly! Oh, yeah, and I ought to be screaming, shouldn’t I?” For a human to be buried calf-deep into the ground, either the tower has to be really, really, really tall (i.e. human bones crunch first), this has to be a cartoon, or he has to be landing feet-first into something like loose sand. The whole description felt a little cartoonish, actually, so maybe that was the effect you were going for.
I also found it disconcerting to be in the viewpoint of a character in the process of dying violently, then switching to another viewpoint, only to (mostly) switch back to the not-so-dead viewpoint. (i.e. Ingold shouldn’t have been aware of what the guards did and said while he was unconscious.)
Others have already mentioned the other things I noticed. Hope this helped.
Just looked it up. The tower at the swimming area was “only” 30 foot tall. Hey, I was a kid when I jumped, and it felt like it reached to the sky.
I still have a problem with the implied height of the tower, but I thought that I should correct myself.
John Ordover (the editor for the Star Trek line over at Pocket Books) often said that the first line of a story has to be brilliant for the story to work. You hit it on the nail with this one.
I’m getting the image of a Wolverine like character here, with some major healing factor. I liked the story. I liked the telling and if you don’t e-mail me the rest of it, I’m going to send the nanite-moths to go eat all of your wool sweaters.
Ivy AT IvyReisner DOT com. Please.
You’d better do it - she’s a woman on the edge.
I enjoyed this, but agree with all the comments so far, especially the ones about it being too cartoony. I also wonder at the guards with their hardy-har-har attitude: Even if you don’t care that a minstrel just died, wouldn’t you be rather alarmed that a plummeting minstrel could have killed you too if he landed on you? And who in this castle is supposed to pick up the corpses?
I think you could clip this all down to Ingold plummeting to the ground and regenerating anonymously except for maybe some startled rats, then have him mourn his non-regenerating lute, not to mention the split tights.
The only thing that leapt out at me was the name Ingold, because that is the name of a wizard in some of Barbara Hambly’s works.
I would seriously consider changing that name.
Seaboe
I liked the way you telegraphed with “he remembered to start screaming” the fact that this particular man is rather different from the usual run of easily crushable men (who wouldn’t need to remember to scream when falling from a tower-top, as it would come to them naturally).
I also think “gelatinous phlegm” is redundant. Fine start, though.