Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Dead Dog 2

This is topic Dead Dog 2 in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by zerostone (Member # 8605) on :

Okay, second version:

When Everett got riled, weird stuff happened. Quantum Anomaly, that's what the scientists called it. His late wife, Lyla, said it was Divine Punishment. And thanks to AI Simulation, Lyla could still nettle him with examples---which she’d done last Tuesday:
…what about the parade? When you worked yourself into a lather and chased Poochie under the Miss Persimmon float, and that caused a six-float pile-up, plus it run over your fool leg...Or when you thought Missy Hoover was making sport of you at the Plant, and you fell in that vat of chicken innards...
Oh yeah, that was Lyla all over---here she was a year dead and she still brought up the chicken thing.
Drat her.

Posted by Nick T (Member # 8052) on :

Hi Zerostone,

Not sure about this as an opening. There's some nice voice when you drop into Everett's memory of the AI simulation, but I think it may have some potential structural problems.

Essentially, you're promising that some weird stuff in your opening line (and I don't mind the use of "telling" here as long as you fulfil that promise quickly), but you move into a flashback. Obviously I only have the 1st 13 to go by, but why not start directly with Lyla and then have the weird stuff happening as a result of their interaction? Taking away the SF trappings, it's essentially a guy remembering his wife nagging him last week. Nothing wrong with that, but I think you might need a different way to enter the story.

Nick

Posted by InarticulateBabbler (Member # 4849) on :

I'd read a little further.

Posted by NoTimeToThink (Member # 5174) on :

Looks like Lila is his Divine Punishment...

I'm already enjoying the voice and the prospect perpetual henpecking and resentment- it is actually more of a hook for me than the cold statement about Quantum Anomaly, even though I bet the anomaly part is your real story. I would read on just for the interplay between the eliving and the dead.

Posted by tchernabyelo (Member # 2651) on :

The trouble (for me) with this opening is that it starts with infodump. You tell us a LOT in the fiirst few sentences - arguably too much. This may sound paradoxical as often we are askingfor MORE information in the first 13, but it's more a matter of what information is presented and how. To my mind, broadly, the first 13 should introduce the story first, the setting second. Her you rattle quickly off a bunch of things that I suspect you think we need to know, but I'd rather let them come through naturally.

The "hook" for me, here, is not the quantum anomaly thing, it's the "Oh yeah, that was Lyla all over---here she was a year dead and she still brought up the chicken thing." That's a great line and arguably you should lead with that, pique our curiosity as to how she is doing it, and then get round to the AI simulation and so forth.