Here are the first (give or take) 13 lines:

The Soul Cloister

Ayma stepped carefully off the end of the oerlander’s ramp, the child’s small, nut-brown hand clasped in her own. The small girl looked up at her with round, black eyes and asked, “Mother, where are they?”

Ayma looked around, but only the rustling marketplace greeted her eyes. The realization of this central artery’s growth lightened her otherwise burdened heart. She could remember when only a handful of booths dotted the dark grey, cobblestone street. Now, the small wooden structures, tented with resilient, white ibyx skins, stood shoulder to shoulder the length of the thoroughfare. Each stand had at least one patron negotiating for the best price on hala meat, spices, or spined fish; some even had lines two or three deep. It was gratifying, a ray so bright it may have come from the Soul Cloister itself. Ayma clung to that brightness, knowing it would help her do what she must.

The genre is high fantasy. It is a short story (under 10K words is still a short story, right?) about a woman from a small planet who makes her living being impregnated by the men of a neighboring world where the women are barren and the planet underpopulated. She and others like her then give the children back to be raised by the men and their wives, so that their endangered people can survive. The story follows her interaction with some of the people of this world, some good, some not so good, as well as her relationship with her bodyguard.

I like your opening. I'd be happy to give feedback if you'd like to send the story to me at luc@meadowdance.org or otherwise point me to it.

In your opening, there were a couple of things that slowed me down or made the reading less clear or more difficult for me. These seemed minor to me, but maybe it's helpful to mention them, especially since they're in the all-important opening.

The length of the created words in the piece and to some extent their complexity made it a little hard for me to read it smoothly; I kind of got stuck on these, like when you're crawling through a ventilation shaft and your turtleneck gets caught on a screw (you know?). The most troublesome one for me was "Thakosrian."

Not that I don't make up words like this myself, of course.

Also, the first time through I didn't get that "oerlander" was a vessel of some kind. It seems perfectly clear on re-reading, but I didn't get it.

"greeted her eyes" seems like kind of a stock phrase, and doesn't seem to be especially helpful to me when I'm reading it. That's a really picky statement, but I figure I'll throw it all out there and you can make use of it if it's useful.

Looking forward to reading the whole story.

Light and fluffy indeed

Oh, and I believe the category that 10k words falls into is novelette. Short stories are generally classified to be <7,500 words.

But if it's good, it's worth the extra words

Rahl

[edit: I always forget something. Just comments. 1) I am interested to see how such a bizarre title fits into your story, 2)I will probably not be able to read it until the weekend, and 3) I have a problem with using too many smiles! ]

At Literary Boot Camp, I seem to recall he had suggested I might want to expand a story I had written (at about 7,000 words) to a 14,000 word novelette; I got the impression that this was exactly the length editors looked for in that category. In the case of my story, it was already apparent from feedback that I had skimmed over too many things, and that if I wanted to fix up the basic story I had, I had better strengthen it by expanding it -- so he wasn't proposing just filler, but was suggesting the longer length better fit the story.

In _How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy_, he mentions that novellas (over 15,000 words) are "usually not possible [to sell to a magazine] for a newcomer" -- the reason is simply that for marketing reasons, the editor is going to want to be able to display a variety of titles and authros for the stories in the magazine, and a novella from a newcomer has no name value and squeezes out two other possible stories that might have appealed to a potential reader. Not that we were talking about novellas, but seemed worth a mention.

PagenQuaker is right about a couple of things (his apparent habit of crawling through ventilation shafts while wearing turtlenecks notwithstanding).

When you are jumping right into the fantastic element of a fantasy milieu, you need to have deep enough POV penetration that the fantastis elements are clearly explained. For instance, "oerlander" might refer to a vehicle, the type of platform that the vehicle has pulled up to, the name of the people that built the ramp, or almost anything at all. If it is worth her attention to notice that the ramp is an "oerlander's ramp," then it is worth her attention to remember why it matters that it is an oerlander's ramp rather than any other kind of ramp.

Also, you are missing an opportunity with the child. Certainly, it would be reasonable for Ayma to be thinking and feeling quite a lot about the fact that she's going to give her child (not contractually hers, true, but born to her body and suckled at her breast) to virtual strangers (even though one of them is the child's father--which brings up her feelings about...oh everything).