posted
Looking for feedback. What do you think of the characters and exposition? Would you read more?
Jack hated cryosleep, but it beat playing computer chess and eating stale rations for the entire trip. The egghead always beat him in less than ten moves anyway. Jack rubbed his eyes and his vision blurred even more, but he could still see it, straight ahead. One moment he was being sealed in that damned fridge and the next, Mars was covering half the viewport. The marvels of modern technology, he thought. He forced his numb legs to move and helped himself to one of the two fresh cups of coffee on the bar.
“I owe you one,” he said to the helmsman. The guy was seated, tapping away at his flight console.
“Hey, no problem,” the man said without looking up. “I’d have thawed your ass out sooner so we could chat, but I wouldn’t have been able to eat so well. How’s our cargo doing?”
Jack looked over to Cryopod 2. The man inside was a sorry sight, shivering and rubbing his hands across his skinny arms for warmth.
posted
This hooked me. The straightforward realism of the Jack character immediately drew me into his perspective. The tone of the character made me believe he had recently come out of cryogenics (which means you accomplished at least one objective, as far as this reader is concerned).
Your descriptive prose is very well handled...not overly complicated, yet detailed enough to convey a mental picture of the scene. Your exposition is pretty well interwoven into the fabric of the paragraphs without becoming overbearing (or shifting into a narrative form, which occasionally happens when relaying information commonly knownst to the characters but unbeknownst to us).
One little nitpick I'll point out involves the third sentence in the first body of text. It seemed a little awkward. Not the content...just the way it was worded. Surrounding lines were fine, not to mention enjoyable (I liked "damned fridge"...my grandmother and I use that term quite often when her appliance shuts down of its own accord). Another parting nitpick is the use of the pronoun 'He' in the beginning of the last sentence (of that first block of text). This is just personal preference, but I would have inserted Jack's name there, to maintain clarity. It's really not necessary, but helpful to the reader, IMO.
In answer to your third question: yes, I would definitely keep reading. The term 'egghead' cropped up a bit unexpectedly (and I assumed it was a descriptive term for either an intelligent member of the crew or one who was not human). Either way, the intro hooked me enough to want to continue. I look forward to reading more of your work.
BTW, welcome to Hatrack.
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited April 18, 2005).]
posted
I agree with mike. I think you should start the story with "I owe you one." Everything before that seemed too much like an info dump, which made it difficult for me to get hooked.
Posts: 202 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Definitely hooks. Keep me in mind when you're ready for readers. Or are you? How long is it?
I got hung up on that third sentence, too. But it was because the 'it' is unidentified until 14 words later.
I hate to disagree with mike, but I'm going to. I think that starting where he suggested is too late. I actually think you should start with that third sentence, something like this:
Jack rubbed cryosleep from his eyes, trying to focus on the great blotch of red that covered half the viewport. Mars.
Something like that. Only better.
[This message has been edited by djvdakota (edited April 19, 2005).]
posted
It's good. I do think that the attention to the third and forth sentances is deserved. There is a minor but fairly critical clarity problem, since those lines establish the exact point in time at which the story is opening. You need to clearly communicate that he is now waking from cryosleep. Then everything else falls into place a little better.
Perhaps something as simple as inserting a line or two bringing us back to the present rather than the hypothetical alternative past would do it.
"...ten moves anyway. But that didn't make waking up from being clinically dead any easier. The only useful information he could get from his senses at the moment was something big and red outside. Jack rubbed his...."
You could fool around with some other small fixes, changing that "and" to a "but" and the "but" to something else, using past perfect for the first clause of the fourth sentance and keeping the simple past of the second part, finding more descriptive tags than "the guy/man", etc. and so forth. But it seems like a very strong opening even now.
posted
I thought it was right good this. The one thing that concerned me is that he played 'computer chess' and the 'egghead' beat him in 10 moves. Well, chess computers have been around since about the 70's and since then they've been able to have different difficulty levels, so you'd have thought that a futuristic one could do as well.
posted
Thanks, guys. The egghead is actually the other skinny guy in Cryopod 2, a scientist. One more paragraph would have alleviated this, but I guess it's a strong enough indication that I should remove the second sentence until later.
I think my term of "computer chess" threw some people off. I'll try to rework it.
[This message has been edited by jhust (edited April 23, 2005).]
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