Vertine saw the single drop of rain. It fell so slowly that it appeared to hang motionless in the sky, and she swooped down towards it. The web of flight-thoughts on her back buzzed louder as she hovered for a moment in front of the drop. With a delicate hand she plucked the orb of water and bit into it, like a fruit. In a few bites it was gone.
Refreshing, she thought, but leaf-dew is sweeter.
She looked earthward for her quarry, down at the waste-ground behind the row of red-brick man-houses. Vertine’s sharp, quick eyes picked out a small figure that sat still upon the ground.
There she is, Vertine thought, the young one.
She shivered as she imagined the first tingle of the woman-child’s energy as it touched her, but then her sharp eyes spotted something else.
[This message has been edited by skadder (edited November 12, 2007).]
I think three hyphenated words in one sentence is too many, I'd loose the last hyphen.
I don't think you can bite a water drop. If you break the surface tension, I think it will spill all over the place. But I could be wrong -- I've never done it.
You are right about too many hyphenated words in that sentence.
Regarding the water, Vertine lives outside of human time, so things remain kind of static for her. I thought the motionless falling drop, and her eating it like a fruit would give some early warning of a 'time differential' that will be made more explicit in the next 20 lines.
Does it work?
[This message has been edited by skadder (edited November 13, 2007).]
I'm sure it means something to you, but at this point it is meaningless to me as reader. It dropped me out of the story cold as I tried to imagine what you meant.
quote:
I had trouble with the " The web of flight-thoughts on her back buzzed louder as she hovered for a moment "
Yes, I had my doubts about that, too. I wanted to try for a slightly different explanation of wings. I was aiming at 'magical thoughts becoming the reality of the desire'(?) e.g. she wants to fly so thoughts don't quite become wings but they do power her.
Still if it is an issue for others I can remedy it by changing it back to 'wings'.
I liked her inner dialogue.
Ditto about the hyphens.
quote:
I liked the concept but the writting felt a bit clumsy, specially the first three lines.
What was clumsy about it? Word choice, or was it difficult to follow what was happening?
Vertine saw the single raindrop sparkling below her in the sky. Her wings buzzed as she swooped down and, with a delicate hand, she reached out to pluck the falling orb of water. For a moment she hovered in the air, just long enough to raise the drop to her lips and drink her fill from it, before casting aside the rest.
Refreshing, she thought, but leaf-dew is sweeter.
She twisted in the air to look earthward. Her sharp, quick eyes hunted for her quarry on the waste-ground behind the red-brick houses. She quickly spotted the small figure that sat amongst the long grass, surrounded by dolls.
There she is, she thought, the young one.
She shivered as she imagined the first touch of the women-childs
[This message has been edited by skadder (edited November 15, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited November 15, 2007).]
quote:
The raindrop glistened below Vertine as she flew across the sky, and it annoyed her immensely.
Her throat was parched and she needed the drink, but it wasn’t catching the raindrop that was the issue. It fell so slowly in world-time for that not to be a problem; it was just the delay that catching it would cause. She tingled in frustration, but her parched throat would not be ignored so, folding her wings closer to her body she swooped after it.
If I don’t drink soon, she thought. I’ll probably fall out of the sky from exhaustion.
The air rushed past her as she closed in on the drop. She reached out with a delicate hand and plucked the orb of water from the sky as she swept past.
As easy as taking a berry from a bush, she thought.
I like the idea of wings made of thought/motivation, but it does need to be clear that they are wings; maybe refer to them somehow as "projected/imagined wings" or "the wings her mind/imagination projected."
The tone of her thoughts is what makes the difference (to me) between my forming a picture of some undefined being in the first version and a human in the last. If this character is a human, the last version is definitely better; otherwise, I prefer the first version, though perhaps it could be made clearer that it is not a human being, since I might be the only person who assumed "alien" from that first draft.
[Edit]
Also, I would be very interested in reading the entire story.
[This message has been edited by NathanClark (edited November 26, 2007).]
It's now called 'A Poisonous Encounter'.