Alnia struggled fiercely in her arms as she tried to fight through the crowd. Even the sounds of the mob seemed dulled by the oppressive humidity. After such a long period of drought, no one had expected so much rain to arrive so late. With one arm outstretched she lunged for small gaps in the crowd, her sense of urgency to see her husband neatly balanced by her need to keep the baby safe. She was almost halfway through the sweaty mass when she heard the jeers and catcalls subside. Relief coursed through her only to be stripped away as the Proclaimer announced “…guilty of sedition and will be taken to Rhimnald and punished accordingly.”

Somehow her whimper was heard by those now cheering around her, and they looked over in a mixture of pity and suspicion.

Alnia and her are different people. I should replace that first her with Reena (I'm not sold on the name yet)

I'm unclear about what's happening here. Is it Reena's husband who's on trial? If so, you might want to make that a little clearer. If her husband is on trial for his life, I'm not convinced she'd be thinking about the weather.

In the second paragraph we’re outside of Reena as she experiences her grief, which I feel cheats the reader of some emotion. Rather than experiencing what Reena experiences, we’re with the crowd just looking at her. I think this could be much more powerful if you make us feel what Reena is feeling.

First, [proper noun] [verb, pt with adverb and so forth] "as" [pronoun] [verb, pt with so forth]"." is a structure that definitely indicates that the pronoun refers to the proper noun. The fact that you had another "her" nestled in the "so forth" clauses didn't clarify what you were doing. Which is to say, dittos to Beth

I would change the first reference to Alina to "the/her baby". Once you establish a baby, it's easy to slip in the name, but if you establish the character name first, we're not expecting you to tell us she's a baby.

And the POV breakdown in the second paragraph is a concern too. Like Doc X said, it lacks feeling. We could have guessed that she'd be lying unconscious in the muddy square once she'd fainted, and we could guess that her baby wouldn't be happy about it, so there isn't really any new information here.

I just don't like it stylistically, it's a bad habit to drop POV, particularly when you don't tell us anything we couldn't have guessed. Consistent POV is really important to clarity.

My guess is that you're about to make a more pronounced POV change anyway, so why not just do that?

About the 13 lines, it's a specific standard, 12pt Courier with 1" margins on regular paper. That would constitute the first page of a standard manuscript submission. Since the first page isn't enough of most stories to compromise the publishing rights, and because editors/minions often decide to reject based on only the first page, we use that standard.

Survivor's right -- don't add too many names at once or it will overwhelm.

"Somehow her whimper was heard" seemed a little weak. Is there another, more direct way to say this?

quote:

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On a completely different note – Buffysquirrel, I’m only seeing 9 lines. As a newb I’m a little confused. Is this a screen resolution thing? Is it 13 lines or 13 sentences? I just don’t want to screw when I finally post my 13 lines…

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I copied the posted text into my wordprocessor, which is already set to 1 inch margins, 12 pt Courier, etc, and counted the lines that way.