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Here are the first 13 lines (directly from the manuscript) of a story I am working on for WOTF:
Jack sorted the voices in his head while his hands straightened his desk. Like walking through a crowded casino, he picked up fragments of sentences here, single words there. If he concentrated, he could pull up whole paragraphs. Much of it made no sense. But some of it did. Some of it scared him; scared him enough that he was compelled to listen, to sort.
He rotated the blurry photo of his father clockwise while a thick bass voice rumbled in his head drowning out the others, like a big truck driving past. It grew louder, moving from gravel to clean pavement, and threw the words “...can’t find the outlet...” at him as it passed. The voice then faded into the distance, through myriad others shouting, pushing, milling, eager to fill the void.
On second thought, he moved the picture back.
[This message has been edited by loggrad98 (edited January 26, 2004).]
posted
I was going to just breeze through Hatrack before I left, but this caught my fancy and I had to comment. This works. From the neat juxtapositon of sorting and straightening in the first sentence, to the casino and truck similes, to the basic idea, I liked it. The words here pull together to do a lot of work. My only suggestion is to replace the semicolon with a dash. Nice going, loggrad. MHO, of course. Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jun 2002
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posted
Well-written. Gotta admit, mentioning "casino" threw me off for a second because then I was expecting something Vegas-y.
Posts: 249 | Registered: Jan 2004
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This is good. You might want nits, and there were a couple places where I was a bit confused -- the casino reference made me think "big room with people" instead of "person alone", possibly because we're getting a simile about the internal world before we've established an external world to contradict it. The only other thing I noticed was that the mention of pulling up whole paragraphs makes me feel like he's reading instead of listening, since people don't tend to notice spoken paragraphs. But these are just nits- overall this is really solid.
Posts: 253 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Thank you for your comments. The casino reference becomes clear as the story progresses, it is set in Reno, NV (where I happent to live...and I could think of no place where people could relate to "crowded" better). Now that I think of it however, it may be somewhat misleading as casinos do not play a big role in the story.
There is more. I actually am working on a re-write and still have the original draft that I am working from. I just wanted to see if what I had as a start was enough to keep an editor reading. =)
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