I owe the following people crits:

intro 1: beating the odds: Excellent characterizations, and I always like to see a scene right up front. from this I'd expect that the cheating was the inciting incident. I might keep reading, thinking that there will be some development on that front. But no eminent danger looms, I don't see a particular conflict, nothing the POV characters are striving for right now.

intro 2: weapons expert. Good prose, nice characterization. I hope the Sebastian pulls himself together soon and gives the narrator someone to talk to; listening to thoughts gets boring. Like many of the entries, I felt like I had missed a scene--

intro 4: natural selection. Opens in scene, and I could really see this scene. nice cadence to sentences. Perhaps due to the rooting interest in my own entry, Bishop seemed cruel and unsympathetic.

intro 5: Preying for time. Opens in scene, good. Great sensory image and good prose. The time freeze weapon would be the hook for me. Again, I feel like I missed a page of manuscript.

intro 6: Hunting for verundi. The expository opening sounds a little --- I don't know. Old-fashioned? Easy reader level? Not bad in itself, but not pulling its weight to get me into the story. I like how the the rest characterizes the guys just enough the set up the Berian and his challenge, which is the intriguing hook. You got to it nicely, smoothly, right up front. good.

intro 7:without a paddle. Again, good action scene -- "where did I drop that first page?" the reader thinks. nice prose, excellent problems to confront. You've really "got them up a tree, throwing rocks" as the famous advice tells us.

intro 8:great white hunter hunting. opens in scene, which I think is most successful. good prose, but the extensive alien language vocabulary took me out of it. Like the detail of the targeting dot at the end as they confront the story problem .

intro 12:blood-red sky. I liked being grounded in the scene with the good descriptive details at the beginning. It's a little long though, and we don't feel any conflict or tension. I don't know what their problem is, what they want, Etc.

intro 13: there's no payout: Good characterization. I like the scene -- just enough detail -- and you get to the Berian and his hook. Nothing technically wrong; sometimes it just comes down to personal preferences.

quote:

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My critiquing skills are a bit off lately, and my writing output (creative writing, I shoudl say) has dropped to nil.

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My intent was not one of eleemosynary purposes. (Yes, I did use a solidly molybdenum word. More anon.) No, my intent is self-serving. In critiguing, I've set myself the challenge of finding the best of any writing while avoiding any subjective or sentimental judgments. My purposes in this exercise are to explore the techniques of and the audience responses to hooks. Teasing hooks out of stories written by others expands my tool kit. Approaching the responses of the audience with an open mind allows me to evaluate audience preferences for hook techniques. Lastly, my least intent was to present a tempering viewpoint.

On a side note, I like melliflous prosody in fable and fairytale stories, less so in hard science fiction. Melliflous prosody in an opening tells me what the mode, mood, and structure of story I'm reading will be. (Oh yeah, a rhetorical scheme of erudition--melliflous prosody, eleemosynary.)

Not every reader likes to be grabbed by the throat at the beginning of a story. In fact, my research suggests the opposite is a more valid representation of the global reading audience's preference. However, emerging writers thrive on writing and expounding upon profound thrills.

In Verundi, I saw much figurative meaning that lent attention to hooking readers at a narrow level of reading: hypertonically close readers. Figurative meaning frequently makes it onto the page through the intuitions and instincts of writers' subconscious minds. If the writer is unaware of the figurative meaning, critically focusing on it might overcome the first or last hurdle to merging it into the story so it enhances the intended literal meaning of a story. Literary allusions, symbolism, imagery, rhetorical schemes and tropes, whatever method of relaying figurative meaning, as long as it's not impenetrable and is consistent and relevant, enhances the literal meaning of a story.

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My intent was not one of eleemosynary purposes.

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So, your intent was not to be beneficial to MrsBrown?

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(Yes, I did use a solidly molybdenum word. More anon.)

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You used a "solidly" shiny-metal-alloy word? Is that a metaphor for a "flashy" word? Do you normally take a more vermiculate approach? Are you intentionally trying to obfuscate?

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Melliflous prosody in an opening tells me what the mode, mood, and structure of story I'm reading will be.

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Uh..you misspelled Mellifluous.

I don't know how many of us pay attention to the melodious intonations of the prose, as much as of the smoothness of voice and pace. Here, there is not a current study of syllabic and sub-syllabic tone, sonantal (phonetics), or resonance of etymological sources, mores the pity. When I first heard about the way resonance affected Tolkien's writing (among many others), it had a ripple effect on my imagination.

Are you suggesting that tone cannot be established without an obvious (uh, intrusive?) narrator? Couldn't characters express tone? But then I guess each character brings his own viewpoint (with tone) to the table. I guess its just one more aspect of writing that I don't have a handle on yet...

My intent in all my hook comments was to not be charitably praising but encouraging, and at the same time address the purposes of the exercise from an egalitarian approach, identify what hooked me most.

Molybdenum is a dense, hard, brittle metal. Molybdenum as a metaphor for torturous or obfuscatory words, that was my rhetorical intent for using molybdenum and eleemosynary. I'll leave my rhetorical purpose unstated and subject to individual interpretations.

Misspellings and other mechanical issues don't usually escape my notice. I'm extra careful to verify spellings due to my poor eyesight. A computer screen falls right in the blind spot of my myopia-correcting prescription glasses and my reading glasses' range. I double-checked mellifluous on the Webster's dictionary application resident on my computer and still managed to misspell it.

MrsBrown,

No, a narrator with an attitude toward a topic is not an exclusively obvious one. A narrator's tone can be as invisible as the narrator. Rhetorical tropes and schemes, modifying words and phrases convey a narratorial tone, sometimes so invisibly that the reader doesn't notice their emotions are being manipulated. A black hat was a symbol for distinguishing the villain from the white-hat hero in black and white Western movies.

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My intent in all my hook comments was to not be charitably praising but encouraging, and at the same time address the purposes of the exercise from an egalitarian approach, identify what hooked me most.

Molybdenum is a dense, hard, brittle metal. Molybdenum as a metaphor for torturous or obfuscatory words, that was my rhetorical intent for using molybdenum and eleemosynary. I'll leave my rhetorical purpose unstated and subject to individual interpretations.

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extrinsic, that's the problem with using $5:00 words when a $.10 word would be clearer. Molybdenum could be a metaphor for any number of things, some might not have even understood the metaphor if you used a more commonly thought of kind of hard-metal, and it obfiscated the meaning of your comments for MrsBrown. That's why I interjected anything at all.

Pointing out the misspelling/typo was more for humor purposes, because it was another uncommon word. (Thus the grin: )

Lol - edited to put the first "i" in "pointing".