posted
Some 450 words; I'll want comments on the entire scene. (I'll take comments on the beginning, if you have them!) OSC suggested a rewrite and I want opinions on how I did!
Only thing really on the opening 13is "is the scientific milieu intimidating?"
Thanks!
--
Joe
Joe tried to keep his impatience under control. The time he and Michelle had on the particle accelerator was being spent on restarting the computer, rather than on running the experiment, and they only had till noon. And Michelle had brought that monster of a dog, her Irish setter, into the lab, violating campus policy and making Joe sneeze.
Other than that, everything was going great.
"It's crashed again," Michelle said. "I think it needs more virtual memory."
"Well, do you think you might increase it, then?" Joe said.
He shouldn't be short with her. He'd always noticed these Amerasian types, but with her...
posted
There's lots of potential for tension and conflict in this opening, but at the moment it's not being exploited to the fullest extent, imo.
Don't tell us Joe is controlling his impatience--show us. Have him grinding his teeth or balling his fists or something of that sort. Maybe he's hovering behind Michelle itching to take control of the accelerator from her.
Although the story implies that time is short, we don't know how short. Telling us just how little time they have, and how long they'll have to wait for their next session, could ramp up the tension. Put something at stake--what do they stand to gain if the session goes well? to lose if it continues to go badly?
I also think it should take a little longer for him to regret his remark. Knowing he spoke out of turn could also make him angrier with her. The opening hints at strong emotions but they don't really come across.
posted
I don't think the milieu is intimidating, but then my boyfriend did an internship at a particle accelerator :-)
The beginning sort of works for me. I want to read the rest, but I'm not particularly interested in Joe's anguishes over Michelle, and nothing other than the computer failure tells me whether something is going to happen.
A note on the scientific thing: currently, particle accelerators are expensive to build and expensive to maintain, whatever their size. I doubt that Joe and Michelle would be allowed to use it unsupervised (unless they're not students but teachers, but then why are they so restricted in their use of the thing?) If they are teachers or scientists, aren't they part of a team or something? The current experiments with particles involve runs that are successive injections of particles inside the ring, and those runs are used by a lot of teams afterwards for different purposes (it is expensive in energy to run those things, even on a smaller scale). It may be different in your world, but unless something is distincly weird I would assume that this is in the near-future (nothing strikes me as unfamiliar, the computer equipment uses stuff that's used today). If this is a very cheap accelerator, could you find a way to signal it, so it doesn't look like a mistake?
quote:He shouldn't be short with her. He'd always noticed these Amerasian types, but with her...
This sentence puts me off in a hard and abrupt way. If that was where your first page ended, I wouldn't turn it. "These Amerasian types" indicate he's a bigot. I think you'd be better off SHOWING what it means to BE that type, then he could think the comment within context at a later time. But unless you wish to immediately paint him as a dislikeable character, I'd strike that reference to a racial group, and make it more specific to HER as an individual: "He knew her type..."
posted
Is this a 450 word scene that is part of a longer work, or is it a flash story? Especially if this is a flash story, it starts kinda slow, and doesn't really hook me.
I'm willing to read the whole thing though -- send to wolf_dude64@yahoo.com.
posted
I think I have to second what Elan said, "Amerasian" doesn't look or sound flattering as a description.
You also need to make that connection a little more explicit. "Joe knew that he was acting like a jerk, because he always made an ass of himself around beautiful women. And Michelle's perfect blend of [various Asian features] and [various European features] was like kryptonite."
Not that anything like that will fit in your lines here, the point is that "Amerasian" probably doesn't work anywhere.
I also have to second the issue of having just a couple of people running a particle accelerator. And virtual memory?
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