posted
What if there was a Supreme life force and they could hide from the high technology of all the great scientists and machines of planet Earth.
What if the Supreme life forces had knowledge and technologies that far exceeded planet Earths technologies.
What if the Supreme life forces had higher than high technology that enabled them to communicate by thought to those they wished, that inhabit planet earth.
"Garic" thought these thoughts, just before a phenomenon unfolded before his eyes.
What if a Supreme life Force, in contrast to modern scientists' total reliance on known laws of physics, has the latent capabilities to awaken arcane secrets that lie beyond the reaches of laboratory tools? What if the art of telepathy and telemetry were as much a reality as any hardcore science, yet incapable of being prodded and probed, touched, or seen as natural; only shrouded by man's own limited state of ethereal development? Such a phenomenon has revealed itself to Garic; the kabbalistic mystery opening like a blossoming rose before his very eyes.
[This message has been edited by Craig (edited May 21, 2008).]
[This message has been edited by Craig (edited May 21, 2008).]
1. There are a few punctuation nits in here - actually only one, repeated many times. Your comma usage isn't correct, and it really breaks up the flow of your sentences and makes me think too much about how a sentence is supposed to sound, rather than just reading the lines and internalizing them. Frankly, you could rewrite this entire piece without a single comma and it would read better than it does now.
2. This doesn't read (to me at least) like the opening of a book. It sounds an awful lot like the beginning of a book jacket's blurb. There isn't anything here that speaks to me of character or setting, which I personally feel are integral to a novel. Using those two points as a starting block might be better than the current pie-in-the-sky idea blurb this currently is. Show us who your main character is. Show us where the opening of your book will take place. If what you're showing us is the crux of your whole novel, I have to wonder why you're selling the farm right there on the first page. What sort of conflict will you be dealing with? Are these Supreme Life Forces benevolent deities? Do they wish us harm? Have they been with us for eons? Or only for the last ten years since they discovered our backwards little planet and figured out a way to control us?
Your first 13 leaves me asking questions, but not the ones that make me want to read more. The questions I'm asking are the ones a tired editor might mumble to himself as he drops your story onto his rejection pile, I'm sorry to say. Take another swing at this and report it. I'm sure there's an idea in here somewhere.
posted
Woah Jason, doesn't the almost complete lack of question marks bother you at all? Maybe it's a stylistic thing that just doesn't work for me.
I think this could work as the beginning of a story if you swing right into some action with a definate POV character. Is this a complete 13 lines? It seems short to me. Good luck!
1. If you're going to edit your opening and report it, either do it in the same post but below your original and indicate that this is a reviced version, or do it in an entirely new post in the thread you've created. This way people can see where you started, read the comments given, and see how you have responded to the comments made. This is just an FYI about how things typically work around here, since i noticed (entirely by accident) that you changed the original version you had posted.
2. I'm sorry, but this isn't much better. Good job on deleting the commas, but then again, don't take every comment you receive to heart - if you felt ther ewas a reason for the commas, feel free to leave them where they were. Also, why is the name Garic in quotation marks? No one is speaking it, and quotation marks are used pretty much exclusively to denote speech.
Okay, now that last line there is what I want to see more of. Why are you wasting my time with all this gobbeldy-gook about the Supreme Life Forces when the story is about Garic? What is he seeing? How is he responding to it? I want to know what the phenomenon is, but the stuff about the Supreme Life Forces (along with the poor punctuation on Garic) doesn't instill any trust in me that this novel will improve. You've taken a step towards improving this, but only a single one, and it wasn't terribly big. In my opinion you should blow-up the beginning and start from scratch.
Of course, my opinion is moo, so it doesn't necessarily count for anything. See what a few others say as well before editing and responding.
PS: Unwritten, the lack of question marks doesn't bother me if these lines are meant to be made more as statements than actual questions. The lack of a y in my name does tend to perturb me on occasion, however.
Jayson Merryfield
[This message has been edited by Wolfe_boy (edited May 21, 2008).]
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