Watching as each drop of blood seeps out of his hands, and feet to soil the land of Sidaharra. He wanted to shout with all his might, so all could hear his pain. Hanging, nailed to the cross, as a betrayer to his kin… to God, for all to see; the cross that he wore so proudly. Raising his head with a agonizing pain to see his only companion, the moon as it reigns over the sky. “Oh holy father, how I have failed you so.” He whispered, with a pain stricken breath. Slowly slipping from reality as each drip of his blood splashes against the ground. Falling into a deep sleep, trying to tighten his grip upon reality. He finds his strength fading into a dreamlike world, as a blanket of darkness clouds his mind.

You have a hook concept that says you have to hook the reader. While this is true, it does not have to be blood, gore, action, adventure, or any of the things that come first to mind. I'll borrow an example from OSC's How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy.

quote:

---

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages.

---

Conceptually, I like what you have going here, but it just seems sloppy to me (no offense)...

From the first sentence there is confusion:

quote:

---

Watching as each drop of blood seeps out of his hands, and feet to soil the land of Sidaharra. He wanted to shout with all his might, so all could hear his pain.

---

What bothers me, is when this is happening, now or then? You say seeps, then you say wanted. Instantly I'm confused about the time-frame. Also, your first comma has to go...

Watching as each drop of blood seeped out of his hands and feet to soil the land of Sidaharra, he wanted to shout with all his might so all could hear his pain.

Now everything is happening at the same time and we know who's watching.... He is watching.

Hanging, nailed to the cross, as a betrayer to his kin… to God, for all to see; the cross that he wore so proudly.

Who's hanging? This sentence is really a bit of a mess. Is the cross hanging nailed to the cross? That's pretty much how it reads. Or did that thought die with the elipses?

Whenever you start a sentence with an "ing" word, whatever comes after the next comma is generally the thing that is X-ing

Raising his head with an agonized pain to see his only companion, the moon, as it reigned over the sky, “Oh holy father, how I have failed you so,” he whispered with a pain-stricken breath. Slowly slipping from reality as each drop of his blood splashed against the ground, he fell into a deep sleep, trying to tighten his grip upon reality. He found his strength fading into a dreamlike world as a blanket of darkness clouded his mind.

You do it again with the word Raising here but your run-on sentence sort of makes it work. Then you do it with Opening later on... You don't tell us what/who is opening... I wish I could remember the term for what it is you're doing, but I didn't go to catholic school where they drill syntax into your skull.

Anyway, that's what I'd do to this fragment with a red pen. Like I said, I really like what you have going here. Your descriptions are vivd and compelling once understood and hte story is intriguing, but your syntax is just confusing. With a personal copy-editor, I think you have some great stuff here.

I don't think the folks who stop by here really concern themselves much with syntax, but I doubt many editors would get very far into this before giving up.

It doesn't feel like you switched to 3rd person, it feels like you rpeliaced the I's with he's. Part of the point of a 34d person viewpoint is that there is no reason to skip to the end scene before telling us the beginning. In first person, there is an argument for this because the narrator, "I", knows the information. In third person you should tell it in order.

My interest is already a little piqued by the knife the kid finds. If you didn't have the first paragraph, I'd read a little further to find out what was up with that. If you're looking to manufacture a way to keep us reading, stop. Start at the beginning and tell your story. A mystery, a death, some danger, some romance, all of these can keep us reading until the end when we get to the guy on the cross, at which point the scene will be far more dramatic.

Added later: Now that I go back and read the other posts I see you probably already got this message. Still, one of my biggest problems with the fragments and feedback section is that the first critique is the only honest one. Everyone else tends to draw on or at least be influence by the other critiques as much by the passage. It's a practice we really need to end.

Somnambulous, I think they're called "dangling participles."

A couple of examples that might make the idea clearer:

"Being so awkward in a sentence, I never use dangling participles."

Now I'm curious, is that correct? Is it the subject of the sentnce fragment "the tree roots kept tripping him" (in this case "him") or is it the first thing after the comma ("the tree roots") that is "running" in this sentence?

Syntactically speaking, are the tree roots running or is the subject, "him" running?

I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter since I don't think anyone would misunderstand that sentence, but is it CORRECT?

quote:

---

for all to see; the cross that he wore so proudly.

---

Rhyming = Bad in novels.

quote:

---

Is it the subject of the sentnce fragment "the tree roots kept tripping him" (in this case "him") or is it the first thing after the comma ("the tree roots") that is "running" in this sentence?

---

If you're asking "Is the subject of the sentence fragment or the first thing after the comma doing the running?", your question, as you phrased it, bears some comment. The answer, though, is "him" is running (Of course we know that means "he" to be grammatically correct.)

However, regarding your phraseology, I wondered if you meant "the tree roots kept tripping him" was a sentence fragment insofar as it was only a part of the sentence, or if you meant it was a grammatic error because it was not a full sentence (subject, verb). If the former, yes, it could be considered a fragment of the sentence, but if the latter, no, it happens to be the main part of the sentence and could be a sentence all on its own. Your Word program would not flag it as "Fragment. Consider revising."

That said, the subject of "the tree roots kept tripping him" is not "him" but "roots." I believe "him" is the object of the sentence.

Had the entire sentence been written correctly, the "first thing after the comma" would have been "him," since he was doing the running, but to restructure the sentence to do that, "him" would have become "he": Running through the forest, he kept tripping on tree roots.

The sentence would have been just as wrong to have been written as "He kept tripping on tree roots running through the forest." Beware the dangling participle.

All that said, had this sentence been in one of the Treebeard scenes in Lord of the Rings, it might have worked as is.

<I gotta stop this already.>
[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited January 23, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited January 23, 2004).]