posted
Word Count: 6300, Genre: Speculative Fiction/Urban Horror
The gray smoke from Kim Jung Hyun’s cigarette drifted up from the burning ashes to curl around her neck. She sat opposite her seonsaengnim, Song Ji Hun, in the Café Bene in Nohyeong Rotary. The days had grown longer as March fell to April, the snowy winter giving way to a rainy spring. Already, it was almost eight o’clock, and Jung Hyun checked a sigh of impatience as she waited for her superior to tell her why he’d called the meeting today.
“The Gwanlyo has given you a new assignment.” Ji Hun took a slow pull from his cigarette, and turned to look at Jung Hyun as he blew a long funnel cloud of smoke from his nose. “We need a human.”
Posts: 1216 | Registered: Nov 2011
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Jung Hyun and Ji Hun--the names are too similar for my taste and not being familiar with the (Chinese?) nomenclature further complicates things for me genderwise, in a way that Jack Hyun and Jill Hun wouldn't.
I like the smoke drifting, but I think you can drop the word gray as we all know what cigarette smoke looks like. Burning ashes?
What is a seosaegnim? Does the term mean boss, or something different.
Otherwise it is a slow start, nicely written, with a gentle hook.
Posts: 61 | Registered: Apr 2012
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posted
The first paragraph, mainly the first two sentences were name heavy for me, two names and place mentioned so quickly in a foreign tongue, not really a foreign tongue, but names that I am not so custom to, lead to a distracting start.
It picked it up and by the last paragraph I was fairly hooked. But watched the cigarette smoke, if its not a integral part of the story, I feel it will become burdensome if it keeps coming up.
Posts: 1168 | Registered: Mar 2008
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posted
This is a rough start for me. Simply too many unfamiliar and hard to read words. The names, Nohyeong, Gwanlyo, all tripped me up. Made it hard for me to follow what was happening, because every time I hit one of those words, it pulled me write out of the story.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
I've read at least two of your Gwanlyo works and I've always thought some of the names were a bit too close, but nothing that was impossible to overcome. It's all those Js and Hs. It's like having Jan Smith and John Smithe in the same story.
As for the other terms, I kind of thought the use of "seonsaengnim" was too much without some kind of explanation. You could quickly clarify with an appositive or appositive phrase. I think that would be an authorial intrusion, but it would be easier to swallow than the foreign term undefined. Something like "She sat opposite her seonsaengnim, her master and teacher," or some such. I think you can safely bet that "seonsaengnim" is a term that most English speaking audiences will need defined.
Posts: 823 | Registered: May 2009
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quote:I've read at least two of your Gwanlyo works and I've always thought some of the names were a bit too close, but nothing that was impossible to overcome. It's all those Js and Hs. It's like having Jan Smith and John Smithe in the same story.
Which is a bad idea and easily avoided, so why not avoid it?
Posts: 2995 | Registered: Oct 2007
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