So here it is for anyone to take a stab at it:
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Julie put six plates on the kitchen table while listening in on the family room discussion. “The idiot challenged me to a fist fight, of all things.” Degan said. “So I made him an example to get other warriors off my back.”
“How long did the coma last?” Toka asked.
Julie took the vegetable pot off the stove and caught Tika’s eye roll along with Nika’s vexed look.
“Who cares?” Degan said. “He challenged me.”
The pot banged the countertop, and Julie marched into the family room. “Is that all you feel about beating an already defeated man senseless?”
“Watch your place, Earther,” Degan said. “In this house we follow Noramian customs.”
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quote:
...avoiding passive action (instead of "The pot banged the countertop", try "Julie banged the pot on the countertop.")
Actually, those are NOT equivalent phrasings.
Here's something I learned from CJ Cherryh: sometimes you use this sort of backward (passive voice or close to it) expression to make things move faster, AND without focusing our attention the wrong way. So:
I lurched to my feet and knocked over my chair.
-- that's slow-moving and awkward.
However... this is more direct and more full of motion, even tho it's technically partially in passive voice:
Bang went the chair as I lurched to my feet.
I don't know why, Smiley, but I never thought Nika and Tika as twins, though I see how that could be. Actually, they're mother and daughter, and this comes out early on in the story.
And No Time to Think; The part where Julie throws Degan's dinner at him is still coming up. Someone in an earlier crit suggested "showing" why she did that. It also gave me time to let the reader in on some things early on. Like I said; I put everything into this draft. My next one will be aimed at trimming off all the fat to leave just the meat of the story for the reader's enjoyment. Care to read? I can send it to you too. Probably sometime tomorrow.