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Opinions? Would you keep reading?

  • 12-09-2009 2:02pm
    #1
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,747 ✭✭✭


    She clutched her bulging stomach and said, “You know what they’ll do if they find us.”

    He rested his hands upon her shoulders and said, “That’s why we run and hide.”

    “David, they’ll catch us.”

    “Not us.” He stood up tall, though his eyes were deep and worn. “I won’t let them do that to us, Maria.”
    ***

    They waited until nightfall. Deep rumbles echoed from the distant mountainside. The sentinels were rising. Their torchbeams swept the sky and land, their blinding rays of light making the darkness even blacker. It was a horrible monochrome world of noise and horror, and the couple shook with fear. David held Maria closer, trying to control his trembling, and partially succeeding. They crouched by the broken front window of their shanty home and looked out.

    Five sentinels in all, their thin spidery legs slowly waltzing across the countryside. Twin red lights glowed atop their dark forms, eyes piercing the shadows. They forever hunted runners---escapees of the New Order---and David had seen them slice open men, women and children with their laserbeams.

    He swore it wouldn’t happen them and their unborn baby.

    When the giant robots crawled off to a nearby hillside, the couple ran.

    It had rained recently. The grasses were slick. Often they stumbled and fell. But they masked their grunts, hissed quietly when they hurt themselves. They ran across hills and through valleys and down long-forgotten trails.

    In the distance, a sentinel turned, and started moving towards them. Its torchbeams licked the coastline to the left. Its red eyes stared at them.

    They stopped and lay down and the woman cried soundlessly. David shushed her and held her close. “It’s going to be OK, it’ll be alright.” He bit down on his sleeve to mask his scream as the robot came up and stood over them and walked past, its white-hot lights continuing to sweep the night for them.

    On they went through a gap between hills to a little village that had a front sign that said Population Zero. It still bore the aroma of burnt flesh even now, decades after the last wipeout. The sun teased the sky and stirred the clouds to spill rain.

    The couple gingerly entered the front gates of the ghost town. Two crows squawked loudly and dove straight down towards them and stopped midflight, their beady eyes empty and cold, their feathers pounding air as they hovered and watched and cried.

    The village was host to twin lines of burnt-out homes reduced to rubble. Old partitions still stood where once stood walls. Doorframes remained like punchlines to forgotten jokes. The pathway between the rows of dead houses was covered in ash and grit and was scarred deeply. Laser-shots or maybe bullets had carved odd shaped into its skin. David had heard of rebel teams freeing prisoners before they were melted. Maybe this village had been one of the lucky few.

    They found a church down the end of the street, the cross at its peak still pricking the brightening sky. The top jut had snapped off so now it was a T. The doors lay to one side, blasted off by some unknown force, and the mouth of the church was wide open, its innards dark, wind slipping out of its gaping jaws.

    They stepped in and the ornate designs had been massacred, along with the bodies that covered the church floor, like a fleshy carpet.


Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 58 ✭✭weiming


    To be brutally honest, I wouldn't be particularly interested in the rest of this. Not because of the writing, but because I've already read "War of the Worlds" and a hundred generic dark future/giant invading alien spin-offs already.

    Just a few things too:

    Specific:

    "...monochrome world of noise and horror..."

    "Monochrome" is related to a visual sense, confusing when followed by "noise", an auditory sense.

    "...thin spidery legs slowly waltzing across the countryside..."

    "Waltzing" is like, walking with cocky ease or even arrogance, it doesn't make these sentinels seem scary but...playful.

    "...a front sign that said Population Zero."

    Is this a clever ruse to keep the aliens away? I mean...who put up the sign...

    "The couple gingerly entered..."

    Gingerly is more like when you fear immediate physical harm, or trying to avoid coming into contact with something distasteful or damaging something. You might touch or handle something gingerly, or perhaps even step onto something gingerly, but you can't really "gingerly enter".

    (There are quite a few more of these...)
    General:

    Things actually seemed to be progressing nicely until we got bogged down in the long, drawn out description of this village. You might simplify the description a lot more and go directly to a plot twist or teaser that makes people want to continue reading, like the hint of something moving in the darkness of the church, or the sudden appearance of a pursuer, or even something as mundane as the woman clutching her belly in pain as the child prepares to come but...something.

    Final:

    Please don't be discouraged, you could turn this into something like a tongue-in-cheek version of this slightly overdone genre by including some unexpected or wacky things in your story. If there are unique elements you plan to introduce, you might want to do that right from the start.

    Overall, not an altogether poor attempt, keep writing!


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 20 neutra


    If this is the first paragraph, I'd rework it a little. I'm sure that readers in general would like as much of an idea as the hero presumably possesses when his heroine asks, perhaps rhetorically, "You do know what is going to happen when..." [and please excuse any misquote there]

    No, no idea at all at the moment, nor a clue as to time nor to place: well, you get my drift and I mention it because I find that a book is always more easily accessible from the vantage-point of both curiosity and a certain "insider" knowledge that the actual characters may very well not possess at this point.

    I personally enjoyed your rather dramatic style of writing (always a subjective thing, I think) and hopefully there is a beginning, a middle and an end that you are headed towards...? Not that it is even desirable to know the whole lot at the very beginning of working out a plot but it is helpful to know that such-and-such an event has to happen by mid-way and so on.

    The most important thing is whether you really want to write this, though. If you don't, no amount of encouragement will keep you going to the end of the process. Conversely, if you are on fire with desire to commit it to paper, then do! Just do it and get the first draft safely down before you ask a single person what they think. Even then, choose carefully the ones from whom you would most like to get feedback: family and close friends have a tendency to be too, too admiring; either that or they daren't tell you what they really think.

    What about a writers’ circle? You need support too. Without it, how likely are you to finish this work? Some people do work best completely alone but I expect you have considered all this for yourself in anycase and so I wish you all the best and much fun along the way; your way, to the end of the last word of your story! :)


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 28,696 ✭✭✭✭drunkmonkey


    why can't maria be sexier, "bulging stomach", i'm put off straight away, maybe maria holding their yet unborn child, maria while heavily pregnant still looked as attractive as the first day david saw her, her breasts now more supple than ever and her behind while a little bigger than usual still had an attraction that everyman would dream about but which no Robot will ever sense.
    As for our hero David walking into the town gingerly?, beef him up a bit, eg. David clutching maria tightly as if in one of their greatest moments of passion, his large frame casting a shdow over the burning remains of a once livley town, His large blue eyes danced widley one moment on his beatuifull maria and the next on the shadows.

    I kinda like your style but think more is going into setting the surrounds than into the charachters. The more were intreaged and curious about the charachters the less the setting matters.

    I know nothing about wrinting but just thought i'd add my 2cent and let you know what would make me read on..


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