Critique #36 — Jeremy Henneberry
Kevin Andrew Murphy July 17th, 2006
The mud squished as Ben Grange rode down the old hunting trail following the other hunters. A cold drizzle fell from the gray sky and only the clinking of their saddles and tack followed them. Winter hadn’t come to the Grangelands yet but that terrible few weeks between autumn and winter lingered for nearly two months. Gray skies and icy rain had turned a bountiful Harvest into a glum Thanksgiving. So much so, the Duke Grange had canceled the Thanksgiving tourney because of the risk the mud in the field would pose to the horses. Despite the miserable weather, the king’s roads remained opened if a little muddy and all the while the common folk spoke of ill omens. But even such ill omens could not dampen the upcoming Yule celebration. As they had left the manor earlier that morning, Ben saw the villagers decorating everything that wasn’t moving and more than one draft horse. But many eyes had been skyward, waiting for the snow that signified Old Man Winter had arrived and they could celebrate his arrival.
Jeremy,
A “grange” is an outlying farm, usually belonging to a gentleman farmer. Ben Grange of the Grangelands under Duke Grange? Okay, I’d buy that grangelands could become a duchy, but the Duke keeping that as his name?
Anyway, huge capitalization problems here. The King’s Roads should be capitalized. Capitalizing “Harvest” marks it as a significant festival, as opposed to a plain-old harvest, but how is that different from Thanksgiving? Or are you trying not to say “Halloween” with its Christian etymology? In any case, this introductory paragraph looks like a holiday calendar with Harvest, Thanksgiving and Yule. Then the business about Old Man Winter mixed with the earlier mention. And then you also have a tourney and a celebration which should also probably be capped as they are seasonal, but if you did that, it would be a thicket of capitalization. Even so, it also looks bad not to have it.
It’s probably just me, but the sentence
which I like best of all this still got a silly gothy image in my head because I was thinking of the horrible weather and the funereal atmostphere and the fact that graveyards tend to be part of such communities and suddenly I was picturing the villages decking out the tombstones and even a few corpses with holly and frippery.
Anyway, my advice is to ditch the modern holiday names unless they’re incredibly generic, like Harvest. While Thanksgiving has old provenance, it’s far too connected with turkey and pilgrims in US minds to be used seriously in a fantasy setting, and Yule will need more atmospheric description to not sound like shorthand for Dickensenian Christmas. Plus, there’s really no point in trying to have an un-Christian fantasy kingdom with generic holidays if you name your protagonist “Ben,” a name that’s straight out of the Old Testament.
Other things: Saddles do not “clink.” The hardware on them might, but not the saddle itself, and what with the drizzle and the squelch of the horses hooves in the mud, no one’s going to hear it. You also might do a better job of establishing what the mud is squishing around at the beginning, because I didn’t know whether it was around horse hooves or carriage wheels, since “rode” could mean either, and while I gathered it was the first, the imagery was unclear.
More than that, you have the guy riding through drizzle in the middle of two months of slimy weather. You’d do better to describe how wet and cold he is, and how it got impossible to remove the damp from everything in that season.
Unfortunately, with all this, I’m not eager to turn the page.
I’m with Kevin–there are too many repetitions of the gray sky and drizzle, and mud, and I’m wondering why sounds are “following them” and aren’t just heard. I think these lines could be trimmed down to one single paragraph–two lines for the weather, which just isn’t interesting, especially at the start of a story–and begin with him watching the villagers decorate, which is at least purposeful action. If the man and the villagers are all looking skyward, there is at last a hint of a conflict–and I might read on.
Hi Jeremy,
I definately got the impression of wetness with all the wet words laced through this. Also that this is Fall but there isn’t any mention of the leaves turning or that peculiar scent in the air or mushrooms and fruit when a person is in woodland.
What I didn’t get until a few lines in was the guy was on a horse. I sort of took Ben Grange for a modern biker until the mention of saddles. I think it was the name.
I think what I am supposed to be seeing her is a man on a horse in a medieval setting. The name rockets this forward into the twentyfirst century. Old names were like Robin of Lockley. The guy’s given name and then the town, or settlement he came from. Another thing making this seem modern for me is the use of the festival names. Thanksgiving is only as old as the Pilgrim Fathers. Harvest festival goes back to the early Christian centuries and could be anywhere from early to late September, depending on the church’s difficult to understand calendar. Yule is on a date after xmas and comes from pre-christian Norse mythology. Might be an idea to pick one time period and one mythos for the festivals. Frex, if you chose pagen, then you could go really far back and then there would be the Samhain festival around the time you want. On the other hand made up one are just as good, if not better.
One area I’d love to see expanded is the ‘ill omens’. The peasants talk of them and then they get dismissed by Ben without letting us know what they are. IMO it would nicely up the tension.
Another point I didn’t get, and I will admit I am home sick with flu so may be having a mega blonde moment, is that I didn’t get why people would want to celebrate snowfall. In a medieval society this would mean the killing and salting of the livestock because it couldn’t be kept overwinter. Only the prime breeding animals were taken in and fed. By the end of winter the meat could get rank and the veggies would be shrivelled.
On the plus side I have a name for the protag and I know he is a hunter with other hunters on horses. I am picturing medieval because of the words king and tourney and I am still intrigued by the ill omen. The last would be what would make me turn the page.
Thanks for sharing.