OK, Gordito,
I've had a frustrating day and I need to take it out on someone, and I can't resist your invitation (I am only marginally kidding. ), particularly since I just accidently erased this entire message and am re-entering it. First off, watch sentence lengths.
Let's number the lines in your excerpt.
Line 1: Get rid of "had," add a comma after "rise," and get rid of "it was."
Line 2: Get rid of "still" and "for." Transpose "even bore" since "even" modifies "resemblance" not "bore."
Line 4: Get rid of the vague "it" and change the words after "that" to something stronger like "clinging to something old felt good." Get rid of the weak "could" and add an "ed" to "remember." I would transpose "remembered vividly," but that's me.
Line 5: Sounds like he spent his entire childhood watching rays on the coast. Change "watching" to "when he watched" and limit that little boy's idle time. Get rid of "the." Get rid of the weak "became" and release the stronger "entangled" of
Line 6: to do its job, maybe with something like "gold and crimson rays entangling themselves on the wavecrests." Period after "wavecrests." You're better off with the plural of "wavecrest," else it sounds like the entire body of water had only one wave.* Get rid of "whereupon."
Line 7: Change "wave" to a plural. *Even if you keep your original wording, "wave" would still be plural here. (If you give a bone to each dog, then they all have one. I had to think about that, but I believe that's right.)
Line 8: Change "it" to "they" due to previous plural changes. Get rid of "up."
Line 9: Change "it" to "them" because of the plural strategy. New paragraph at "Kennedy."
Line 10: Change the comma after "lifetimes" to a dash and the same with the comma in
Line 11: after "chosen." Period after "nose." Avoid the vague "it" again and change the sentence that straddles lines 11 and
Line 12: to something like "He focused his thoughts back onto the present with great remorse." ("Remorse" was a typo in the text.)
Line 13: Get rid of the first seven words. They're cliched and prevent your sentence from being as strong as it could be. Add "when" before "his world."
Line 14: New paragraph. Get rid of the also vague "That" and change to something like "The thought of Sol." Get rid of "completely." Adverbs are not your friends.
Line 15: Change "towards" to "in," unless the sun was rising from west to east, in which case you'd have to rework that.
Line 16: Change the period after "horizon" to a dash.
Now read it all out loud and see how it sounds. Not perfect, but better, no?
In spite of my red-lining, I thought the excerpt had a nice style to it--a relatively minimum number of words to convey a lot of information.
[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited July 15, 2002).]