Reclining on a stone portico overlooking Hrzecal Bay, Joram Manka restlessly honed one of his tempered dudgeons and watched the clouds swirling over the aquamarine water. It was just after First Dawn and the ruby rays of Mother pierced the fog, adding to the garish display from the city below. Chill dawn air swept across the open expanse of the courtyard as it fell from the highlands to the bay below drawing the faint scent of eucalyptus to his nostrils. Already the cold stone had worked its way through his thin calfskin breeches and began steadily numbing his flesh, bringing a dull ache to the hollow bones within.
He paid it no heed.
“Sithgar and the Ant Bear shall meet again,” he mouthed as he gazed into the sky.

I also hesitated for a moment wondering why the courtyard was falling from the highlands into the bay, but I figured it out eventually.

The last line really didn't work for me. Mouthed? And it seems kind of meaningless, based on what we know so far.

I found the second part of the first line, "Joram Manka restlessly honed one of his tempered dudgeons" technically excellent but somewhat ambiguous. What does "tempered" mean in this context? It could have several meanings, given the context and the term "honed". It could mean that his dudgeon was attenuated and thinned, or that it was the result of his basic emotional instability, or that it was very strong. All of these meanings seemed likely to me, and yet none of them get me any closer to knowing what kind of dudgeon it is. Is he nursing an old grudge back to full strength for some reason, or wearing his native sulky reaction to some immediate down by looking at the beautiful scenery, or what? I really have no idea.

It follows all the rules, but I have no idea what it actually means.

I liked the introduction of "First Dawn" and "Mother", but felt you should have lingered over that a bit to give the reader time to assimilate it. Perhaps if you mentioned how long it would be before the next sun rose in the sky, or compared the two (or more) suns involved. A minor digression, and one that would set the scene a bit better and give us more context. It should be easy enough to work into the POV, since Joram is watching the dawn after all.

You also move too fast over the description of the city, the bay, and the local vegetation and terrain. Way too fast.

It appears that the "dudgeon" choice for his weapon was a bit off-putting and in reviewing it this was my conscious choice because as a reader I like to be challenged by unfamiliar vocabulary, but, alas that is a personal bent.
For Survivor - the tempered reference was merely a description of the blade construction.
Thanks for the push regarding needing more details about the opening scene.. I'll work on it.
Did anyone else feel uncomfortable about the 3rd sentence where I've got the courtyard..er.. the air falling across the courtyard?

Overall, I liked this opening, which I thought did a good job of drawing me into an unfamiliar setting without hitting me over the head with spec fic credentials.

That first line doesn't work for me, however. I can't put together a visual image of someone honing their knife restlessly.

I would recommend not modifying every noun with an adjective. It begins to look forced and overwritten after a while. Less is more with adverbs and adjectives--using them sparingly has more impact than bombarding the reader with them at every opportunity.

Chill dawn air swept across the open expanse of the courtyard as it fell...

As has been suggested, that "it" could easily refer to the courtyard rather than the air, so it is easy to misread this as the courtyard doing the falling. Consider rephrasing .

I never heard that usage before. It certainly makes your earlier comments clearer, however from the context I think there would have been enough to determine I didn't mean that, esp. since it is plural. Thanks for the information, I appreciate it!

Oops, meant to point out the emphasis there was mine.

Generic "you", she hastens to add .

Too much challenge before you have them hooked will not hook them.

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So you advocate deliberate obfuscation, buffy? Seriously?

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Did I come across as doing so? Perhaps I got a bit carried away.

I confess to being irritated when writers are told they can't use any words that aren't in a 10,000 word vocabulary. If readers aren't exposed to new words, they will NEVER learn those words. If they never learn them, then writers following this diktat will never be able to use them. Vocabulary will shrink. More and more words will become off-limits. Newspeak will beckon.

Sorry, getting carried away again.

I believe somewhere way back in this thread I advocated using words appropriately. If Omakase is using "dudgeon" in order to create a sense of 'other' in their Fantasy world, then I think that's appropriate. If Omakase is indulging their love of words, I also think that is appropriate. Obfuscation for obfuscation's sake? Possibly not appropriate.

Removing words because they might send someone, somewhere, to the dictionary? Wholly inappropriate!

Entertaining in the prime directive.

Whatever genre you choose to write in, whatever style you adopt, whatever subjects you write about, whatever length you write at, all those are factors that will attract some readers in hope of finding 'their kind' of entertainment and deter other readers for whom that doesn't look like their kind of entertainment at all. Inevitably.

If someone says "I am not entertained by stories with unfamiliar words that I have to look up in the dictionary", then that is a valid comment to make when critiquing. Someone going on to say, in effect, "therefore, you can't use this word, because no reader will like your story if you do", on the other hand, suggests that readers can be entertained by only one kind of story: unchallenging ones. All I am saying is that there are readers for both unchallenging, 10,000 word vocabulary stories AND for challenging, 25,000 word vocabulary stories.

However, I did look it up -- because I'm guilty of an occasional malapropism -- and found that it is not simply an archaic word for "dagger," but a dagger with a handle fashioned from "dudgeon," itself an obsolete term for boxwood. I still do not actually object to the use of dudgeon at all, and would have no problem equipping a character with a ballock dagger or kidney dagger either.

My only point ("And I am unanimous in this!" -- Mrs. Slocum) was that you've got some readers reaching for a dictionary in the first 13 lines, but OSC is clear that the honeymoon with your readers lasts only a few paragraphs in a short story and a few pages in a novel. If they've got to put down my book to go fetch the dictionary before they're already convinced my story is truly worth the work then that is a risk I'm not at all prepared to accept.

Where I stumbled in that sentence is the word "tempered." Blades are first hardened, then tempered, or softened, to make them less brittle, more durable, less prone to shattering. I immediately assume an edged weapon carried by anyone with serious skill or intent is indeed tempered for hard use or else it is a useless decoration, so it comes off as redundant to me (probably a minority of one anyway, so small bother).

Otherwise, I liked the juxtaposition of a serene dawn, the peaceful beginning to a new day, with the restlessness of Joram, who seems to me a banked fire prepared to flare up the instant something stirs him to action.

I don't particularly like the word "mouthed," because it makes me think that he made the motions as if speaking the words but without uttering a sound. Perhaps that is your intent, but I couldn't be sure.

(Edited to remove a redundancy and to add a couple of words to improve clarity.)

I didn't reach for a dictionary. The word "dudgeon", though not one I use every single day, is not a word that makes me grab a dictionary. I didn't even think to check it till Omakase mentioned that he was using it to mean some kind of weapon. I thought the confusion was because "tempered" could mean so many different things in that context.

Not everyone knows the more current meaning of "dudgeon", but a lot of people do. Even some of the people that look it up in a dictionary are going to assume you meant the first meaning listed. I thought the notion of "honing a well tempered dudgeon" was great, I just wasn't clear on what it meant because there isn't a lot of POV information to clarify it.

In fact, that's part of why it felt natural to assume that phrase would be POV information rather than an external description of a physical action. Just a little more POV information would clarify things a lot. I'm not saying that you can't use the word, you just need to clarify the usage because the meaning you're using it in is very rare.

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An author already divides his reading audience when they choose to write in a certain genre. To divide it even more by making work more difficult than is has to be, thus further isolating readers instead of embracing as many as possible, would be a folly, me thinks.

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*beats head against wall*

If you wish to follow this policy, that's fine by me. I would only point out that the largest market share, by far, belongs to romance, and that, following this reasoning to its logical conclusion, we should all be writing that. Eschewing what c. 42% of the market finds entertaining is surely an act of much greater folly than sticking in a word that one or two people might not know.

It's amazing to me that we can all breeze past the fact that SF&F is a minority interest, one that's despised in many literary circles, is routinely sneered at by the literati, one that will render us pariahs wherever "real literature" is discussed, but we can't deal with the idea that somebody might use an unfamiliar word. Our readers can stand to be routinely sneered at as geeks, but won't reach for the dictionary. How little faith we have in them.

I have absolutely no objection to someone using obscure words (I've been known to indulge), but I think it's a lot less wise to use a word that has an archaic meaning (which I wasn't aware of - and I consider myself to have apretty extensive vocabulary) when there is a more common meaning that a reader would be more likely to use. Have him honing a cinqueda and I have no problem - if I don't know what a cinqueda is, I can guess by context. But if I think I know what a dudgeon is, but I'm completely wrong, then at some point I'm going to hit a "huh?" moment when I realise the author and I have, effectively, been talking at cross purposes. So I wouldn't use dudgeon in this insteance.

Other than that, although the introduction is highly stylsed and doesn't really indicate where it's going to go, I would read on, because it's got a verve that I don't often see.

PS - Also, the image I get in my head from reading the first paragraph is something akin to a Lawrence Alma-Tadema painting - something like "A Coign Of Vantage" - and sentimental old Victorian painter though he might have been, I do love his art. So that helped.

PPS - BuffySquirrel, I've checked your postings in the "Published Hooks and Books" forum, and so far as I can see you've chosen examples where the author(s) have coined their own words, and those words are clear in context. That's a fine, valid and time-honoured technique, and I don't think it's the saem as the issue here. If the opening had someone "honing their fine, tempered rachkilya" then I guess we'd have all assumed it was a weapon. Made-up words, fine. Words with other, more commonly understood, meanings, not fine. What we'd be discussing if someone had been "honing their fine, tempered shuttlecock", only for it to be revealed later that a shuttlecock is a Thandraxian duelling weapon favoured by the Elders of Wangpluut...

I'll shut up now

For example: I one read in a book about writing (Probably OSC's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy) that a class was given a short story to read that talked about a bus as if it were a lumbering reptile. It was supposed to be a metaphor. The non-SF readers got it. Those who read SF thought some wierd bio-engineering was going on. I think the same problem is going on here.

Ok, so comments on the second version:

I'll list my personal bias up front. I'm not a big fan of overly wordy sentences. Maybe you're trying to set a certain tone, and it's just not grabbing me personally. I say 'overly' wordy because every one of these sentences runs at least two lines.

I would suggest dispensing with some of the many adjectives you have. In the first sentence, you don't particularly need "matching" with poniards, as you've already said "one of..." I don't feel it's really necessary to add a color description to the water, whether it's aquamarine or azure. Maybe if it were bright red or something...

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Chill dawn air falling from the highlands swept across an open expanse of the courtyard past him to the bay below*,* drawing the faint scent of eucalyptus to his nostrils.

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This would read SO much easier to me if you added that comma. (Although I must admit that this was another long one that had me stumbling).

I agree that "unable to sleep fitfully" is a bit off.

We know Joram, where he is (Hrzecal Bay), and what he's doing (honing a weapon and fretting). I would like a bit more information on why he's fretting and what Epikours was, and less flowery description. At least for the hook, until I really know what's going on.