Critique #54 — Alley Hauldren
Kevin Andrew Murphy August 16th, 2006
“Dear Goddess of the Night. Hear my plea.â€
     Darhna knelt in the tall grass. The moon hung full and low in the eastern horizon, luminescing the grass tips, like spears to pierce the sky, exposing the stars. Each pinpoint of light birthed a God or Goddess, major or minor, some became legend and some remained without history.Â
“Lady of Love, Queen of Virgins, I beseech thee.â€
She bent over the cleared area, digging a small indentation in the dirt, using the excess soil to encircle it, placing the incense cone inside the little dirt mound. Surely, the Goddess could not miss her, alone in the middle of the night, desperate as a maid in heat, debasing herself in the prairie with no one near for hundreds of urs.
I dunno why the font came out so different on the last line. That sucks.
Fixed it. Lots of times the fancy font tags get screwed up in email.
Just try to send plain text in the future.
Alley: I tried to fix it, but you seem to have imbedded two fonts. Dunno how. I’m no tech wizard.
Your opening will certainly appeal to a readership that likes witchcraft, goddesses, magic, and girls who deal with them. The things that made me stumble in reading it were these:
Second sentence–the entre thing, actually. First clause–the horizon is a line, so the moon is either hanging in the east or above the horizon, isn’t it?
“Luminescing” is a very awkward sort of verb. If there is magic going on with moonlight, how about explaining it a little later–and if the moonlight is just lighting the grass tips, how about saying that? Even illuminating would be slightly better, though really, if this is not the main action, a heavy-powered verb slows things, doesn’t add.
Then you have a very awkard construction–at first I thought the metaphor reached back to the moon, so how does a moon act like spears to pierce the sky? Then I went back and figured out that the grass tips were meant to pierce the sky, but it took me some time to try to see if you meant literally–it’s a zillion feet high–or for some reason grass looks like sky-pricking spears. Then I could not figure out who or what is exposing the stars. Especially since on a moon night, the stars are visible already, right? Color me very confused by now.
But where did the cleared area come from? Last we saw her, she was kneeling in grass. Then a series of progressive verbs implying that she is doing three actions all at the same time–digging, encircling, and placing. Why not “she dug….she encircled…and then she placed…”?
Then I really tripped over a “maid in heat.” A maid implies a human, and humans don’t go into heat like dogs and mares, etc.
Finally, I had real trouble with “urs” as a measure of distance–there is no indication if this is like miles or inches, and meanwhile I have to try to forget the usual meaning, which is a prefix indicating “primitive” or “ancient”.
My suggestion is to simplify your prose a lot. Use simple, vivid verbs and constructions. Do try to get in the five senses, but don’t overload a single sentence with several metaphors, especially when they’re all visual–the reader actually experiences more if you include sounds, smells, touch and when you can, taste.
Thanks for fixing
It looks right in Word but didnt copy right.
Alley,
This beginning is intriguing but overwritten, and you’re using the wrong word in a number of instances, sometimes something as small as a preposition. The first thing that stopped me was this:
The moon hung full and low in the eastern horizon
The trouble with this is “in” and “horizon.” The horizon is a line where the earth meets the sky. It’s an edge. As such, things can be set “on” it, “above” it or “below” it, but not be “in” it. What they can be “in” is “the east.” So fix it one way or the other.
Similarly, grass tips don’t “luminesce” except for poetically. But why use that instead of “illuminating”?
Then we get into the business about oodles of gods and goddesses being birthed by grass tips, and what does this have to do with your protagonist who’s out in the middle of the prairie to worship just one?
Then we go on to the business with the incense. If she’s bothered to trek all this way out into the bush with incense, why didn’t she bother to bring an incense burner? Also, incense cones sound suspiciously modern and I wouldn’t put them before the invention of matches in the mid 18th century. I know, because I’ve bought it, that old-style incense used in rituals and temples was a mixture of resins, salts and aromatic herbs, woods and spices meant to be placed atop of coals. In fact, Catholic churches still use this method and have special briquettes designed for exactly this sort of incense.
Actually, I was just curious so did a search and pulled this up off the web: The Japanese invented the incense cones used today, and presented them at the World’s Fair in the late 1800’s.
So we’ve got late-Victorian technology here mixed with goddess-worshipping polytheism.
I’m not certain whether she’s going to be lighting the incense with the powers of her mind or with matches, but as a reader, I don’t much care. It reads more like a modern neopagan high school girl going out in a vacant lot to cast a made-up spell than an actual young priestess in a fantasy world going off into the wild grasslands for solitude to beseech the gods, or at least one goddess in particular.
Also, this line is rather inadvertent humor:
desperate as a maid in heat, debasing herself in the prairie
This sounds more like her at very least masturbating naked right there in front of the Goddess and everyone than just grubbing around in the dirt with incense cones, which as debasement goes, really doesn’t rank.
Hyperbole is all well and good, but phrases which leave the interpretation up to the reader’s imagination will often have far more interesting interpretations than what you meant. Especially with genre readers.