Hello everybody!

This is place to talk about my work so far. Please be honest and frank. Someday I'd like to be a published author, so good feedback now is important. They only thing I ask is that you tell me why you feel the way you do. That way I can better adapt to the readers.

Fog of Redemption

Hi, Gil,

An interesting start I thought it was going to be relatively straight forward, but the ending has me questioning what sort of story this is going to be.

A few (hopefully) constructive comments:

1. Learn how to get rid of the double spacing. This is a characteristic of converting Word documents to HTML and there are ways to avoid it. Check with someone else who posts eFiction regularly on what they do -- I could offer some suggestions but since I've never submitted anything in the latest version of the software, I'm not sure on the exact steps required.

2. You need to work a little on your dialogue to make it more realistic. It's close, but there are plenty of examples of how it comes over as stilted. Fixing it isn't a lot of work. For example:



Most people would have ended that statement with "go see someone about them." Repeating "these dreams" is redundant and makes it sound (to me) unnatural.

Similarly, the second sentence would typically have started with "You've been woken up...". In dialogue, look at using word contractions where it seems natural. Not using the contractions is fine when the speaker wants to emphasis one of the words (eg. "You have been...." would be used if it was in response to a denial of this fact), but most of the time a person will use the contracted versions when speaking.

Lastly, this paragraph shows how an editor can help -- the word "hint" should probably have been "hinting".

3. You've included a sex scene in the opening chapter. That would tend to imply that the story is going to be heavy on sex, since I couldn't see how that story advanced the plot. If that is not the case, then you're risking alienating those readers who are looking more for a story than for sexual descriptions. To be honest, I only skimmed that section, just reading enough to make sure I wasn't missing any plot elements.

4. The ending may be contradicting the earlier part of the story. If Gil believes he's responsible for the dreams, would he really have said the stuff earlier about want Allen to seek help? Or his comment that implied it was something in Allen's past that was triggering them? This is not necessarily something wrong with the story, but it's an inconsistency that will have to be resolved.

Good luck!

Graeme

Graeme,

Wow. This is exactly what I was hoping for. My goal here, is to become a better writer. I'll take all the constructive comments you want to throw my way. (That goes for everyone else too)

The double spacing I can take care off. I'm still learning the ropes for forums and e-fiction on this site. I have been reading here for a while now and thought it was high time to contribute. I can code the text in HTML format.

I totally understand where you are coming from on the dialogue. It's something that I struggle with. I speak very formal myself, rarely using contractions. Mostly, it's because when I was learning to talk, my mother was taking english courses in college. She was always correcting the things that came out of my mouth. My brothers and sister are just as bad. Believe me, the first write was a lot worse. Thank-you for telling me though, it means that I have to work a little but harder as I rewrite. As I mentioned before, I am still pretty new to this. I didn't feel right asking for an editor having just joined and only having three chapters of a story up. I have not even applied for author status yet. You are absolutely correct. I do need one.

Gil's suggesting that Allen should see a shrink is part of his "cover-up". Even though Gil knows what is causing the dreams, he can not let Allen know the truth. The last few lines of that chapter give this away. '"I'm sorry my love," he said. "It’s because of me that you have these dreams. I let myself become to close to you." He looked out the window and up at the moon. "Oh Gods," he whispered. "What have I done?"'
I see the point though. I was hoping Gil's confession would make people think the opposite. That he doesn't need a shrink and that there is a reason Allen is having the dreams. You do echo my own fears however, about the sex. Allen and Gil are going to be apart through out most of this book. Neither are the cheating type. Actually I have been racking my brain over the past week thinking about how to incorporate more sex into the story without compromising my main characters. Never fear. I have a few idea's. While there will not be sex on every page, there will be some. I will post a disclaimer letting readers know.

Again thank you for your words. It's good to know that I have things I need to work on. It's all for the readers.

In case you have any trouble with the eFic upload, here are two very easy ways.

The first, mentioned in this thread, is to save a word doc in filtered HTML. it also mentions how to turn on the editor in Efic, if it isn't on for you already.

The second way is copy and paste from word, but that ofetn gives you the double spacing. What I do is to used the find replace features, and search for
^p^p
and replace all with
^P

Those are the codes for paragraph spaces, i think, but it works. Then, after doing that, I select all text, got to format, paragraph, and set the spacing before at 18, after, 0. Then save, then copy to the clipboard, then use the W "paste from word" button.

Hope this helps!
CJ