Thanks to all ahead of time for tearing it apart!

First Person version:

There came a morning when I found strength to play upon my harp. So I took it outside after morning sunshine had burned away the last frost and warmed the ground barely enough to sit upon.

It had been my mother's harp and her mother's before her, given to me upon my marriage, nearly three summers ago. Sometimes I still feel as if just a day or two have passed.

My younger son Flint sat close by me, humming as if he was trying to sing my songs. He seemed fascinated, by the wood, reaching his tiny fingers to trace the egrets carved on its great arched neck.

Flint was close to the end of his babyhood, a strong infant whose bearing gave hint that he would be an even stronger youth.

Third Person version:

Week after month of famine time found Rain little inclined to play upon the harp of her Reed ancestors. With her husband Snow of the Stones and all the other men so long gone to war against the Axe folk she had enough work just to keep herself and her children alive without energy wasted on the old songs. This morning however, she realized the silence which filled the voids of her days ached more than her numb fingers and empty belly. So she found the strength to carry the heavy instrument outside as she had done in happier times.

With harp in hand, Rain flung back the hides that served as a door for her woven wicker bower, blinking at the suddenness of yellow sunlight. Perhaps springtime was finally here, though the cold wind still cut her, chilling to the bone.

This is a tricky thing. I think it won't be easy to clearly identify these people as people right up front, when they have names like Rain and Reed. But I like the idea. I like it very much, actually.

Another problem is that it IS expository, but also expository without enough information to REALLY sink me into this world. Well, OK, there's a lot of information there, but not enough explanation behind it. You introduce at LEAST nine elements in that first paragraph alone--characters and situations. That's a lot. Take me in a bit more slowly, and with a more active scene.

I also like the first person version, but I'm hoping something will happen soon to help me understand what this story might be about.

In the first-person segment, I had no idea she was living in a subsistance culture. I imagined her going out onto a well cultivated lawn surrounded by flowers, with a carriage path behind a hedge, so passers-by would hear her playing. And it was merely odd that her son was named "Flint".

Answering comments:

Elan, I agree 1P is more intimate and more exploratory of inner process, but the rewrite was because several experianced writers felt (as does jinkx now) that 3P has the potential for better clarity. Others felt the 1P was too stifling. I hope to make the 3P less cold the next rewrite, but that is one of my bad habits as I spend much of my days writing coldly (brutally) clinical nonfiction.

jinkx and djvdakota,I'm afraid I'm stuck with the character names as this is a second story and the first is already finished. I used to get frustrated reading Andre Norton in the 60's for the same reason, as it sometimes took me a half chapter to understand naming styles in her stories. Back in the old days I think Sci Fi writers used it deliberately to disorient people and shake them away from normal frames of reference. Now that is an old stylism. Perhaps I should introduce them more slowly?

djvdakota, Is the important point that I've fallen into the sequel writer's trap of jumping into the middle, presuming prior knowledge of the milieu, names and action? And what I really need to do is more completely tell a current action and not immediately blast the reader with too many confusing details?

wbriggs, If you were writing this would you make more hook in terms of her depression and inner devastation, in the war itself, in her family losses, description of the scene? See if the next example at the bottom is too melodraumatic.

Survivor, this is the main point of the story, that she was a ruling member of a neolithic garden culture which has been utterly destroyed fighting off attacks by the protocelts. So what I need is a semantic tag to immediately identify milieu without so much oblique description. Maybe well known but not overused words to positively but obliquely identify time and place?

I can see that I'm going to need an entirely new way of opening to make it work. Give me a few days or a week or so to work on this and I'll get back with you.

Perhaps something in this direction? Or is this too contrived? This is not well thought out, but maybe I need more spontaneity to get the direction I need. The 3P efforts seem less honest than the original.

The woman Rain scarce had heart to push aside what remained of tattered deerhide draped over her stick and mud hut to enter a world left bleak by losses. The noise and light woke her younger son Fire, but she scarce heard his protest for the sorrow which paralysed her will even as the wind left icy tear tracks across her pale cheeks.

Little was left of her life nor folk except the few who hid with her in deep fens beside the Mother River. Like her they were always afraid of the men of Axe and Horse who sought to enslave them but she was the worst affected.

There was no more laughter carrying across the barley fields while women tilled and men found excuses to drink and gossip, pretending to knapp at their flint or gather wood for the great Beltaine fires.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited September 17, 2005).]

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited September 17, 2005).]

The third person seemed better in a lot of ways, but I still couldn't accept that harp.

I'm going to admit something here, I actually read them out of order, I read the third person one first and then tried the first person one. I disconnected it from the other passage and read it stand alone, but I didn't read it first.

Anyway, just thought I should admit that

This last version is much too negative, very melodramatic. I'm glad that the harp is gone, but it strains too hard for the tears. If this version had featured a harp, I would have thought it an overblown metaphor for something.

The problem of the harp is that it is as intrinsic to the story as Vonnegut's china piece in "Slaughterhouse Five", so I'm kind of stuck with it.

Survivor, as long as we're admitting things, I'll admit that in real life I'm a shrink who works all day rehabilitating seriously mentally ill people. So I tend to look at devastation, despair and hardship in a different light. This is part of the problem with my writing in that I see tangled webs of really bad emotion as common problems to be repaired but readers would be put off by the rawness. I disagree the last version is too negative; indeed it is not negative enough for reality, but perhaps it is too negative for normal readers. Putting these stories in pre-Celtic Europe is a way of allowing the reader to distance from some of the negativity and it makes it more challenging to write. I know the landscape of the mind pretty well, but the external landscape is a challenge which makes the process worthwhile to me.

Let me clarify something unrelated. I sent out an email last night to those of you who have been kind enough to help with this critique and who posted email addresses. It offered to snail mail a copy of the first story. I got a reply today that misinterpreted the offer as a request for readers.

I don't need story readers for either story, just critique of my technique for opening this, the second story. The first one is out and gone and this one won't be ready to "read" for years. I just have some extra proof copies of the first one and thought that some of you might be interested in reading for the sake of reading. (Does anybody ever read for fun any more?) It is not something that somebody would want to be stuck reading as a proofreader as it is 300+ pages and styled in a too Kafka-esque style.

K2

I think there is greater potential for depicting desparity in first person.

I thought of a few ways you might be able to tell time and place in a subtle but effective way.

House interiors of the Neolithic peroid were painted with elaborate scenes of humans and animals. Perhaps you can work in paitings of the battles with the protocelts or something?

The woman Rain scarce had heart to push aside what remained of her hutment doorhide to enter a world colored grey by her sadness. The sudden stream of sunlight woke her younger son Fire, but he stirred a moment and fell back asleep with the easy contentment known only to children and those who have already resigned themselves to death.

She still despaired for she had not yet given up her life to the Mother of the River, though each heartbeat was one closer to starvation. Her thoughts raced, though she gave no outward sign except for tracks of icy tears blown across her pale cheeks by a relentles wind.

The first laughter in nearly a season escaped her lips as she imagined Father Mountain's frigid snoring breath as he stirred to shrug the blanket of snow from his shoulders.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited September 18, 2005).]

You've worked primarily with modern people, and you're a modern yourself. Of course you can't see how primitives percieved the world around them. But knowing that you don't know is the first step

This last version is even more melancholy than the last. That's not believable to me, this woman doesn't have the liberty to be melancholy. And it doesn't engage me, I don't have the patience for a fictional character's moping. Put it in the past tense, show us what she does when she stops moping. Or show us what grieves her, and then mention her reaction in passing. But you can't get sympathy for a fictional character by begging for it. That doesn't even work for the sorrows of real people. You need to show us that she deserves our emotional investment, not just that she wants it.

Does that make sense?

About offers to read...I don't know about everyone else, but for me, if someone's offering to let me read and I suspect that I won't have any feedback more useful than "this was a lot of fun", I don't feel any guilt whatsoever about accepting the offer and reading it just for fun, and then sending a "critique" that says "this was a lot of fun."