Spookshow, have you been given enough dissection of your work...
*raises scalpel*
Or would you like someone else to voice an opinion?
*a single drop of red ink, like blood, collects and drops off the tip of the blade*
Thought you'd never ask.
Give it to me straight, doctor.
*puts on surgical mask and gloves, dons bowtie, and taps the scalpel in the air like a conductor's baton*
("Epic" and characters 'Dexie' 'Amolcus-Rath' and 'Rom'Catha' (c) a. levinton, 2006)
Prologue
None of it would have happened if he hadn’t tried to hide.
Had he been bright enough to consider that perhaps he should stand still like a good little victim and allow himself to be paralyzed with fear like all the others, had he simply kept his mouth shut and saved his breath for terrified screams of twisting agony, none of it would ever have happened.
You had a good opening note, but your run-on sentence was a cacophony compared to the sweetest of the first sentence.
There should be a rhythmn, a flow to what you want to say, but your words tripped up what you are trying to say. I had to re-read that sentence - and even if I only had to re-read it once, that's once too many. Sadly, it wasn't only once.
Pardon me if I harp on this, but this is your opening gambit to your piece. You cannot mess this up! You cannot assume your reader will be patient enough to sit through that... that... that... that reminds me.
That. That is where it begins. What? That? What that? Where that?
Had he been bright enough to consider that perhaps he should stand still like a good little victim...
That that.
Yes, when I read it through, it fell into place, pieces of a puzzle. It's too early for puzzles though.
Had he been bright enough to consider that, that perhaps he should stand still...
Had he been bright enough to consider that, then perhaps he should have stood still...
We're not even a sixth of the way through that sentence, and already I'm having issues deciding what it is that you are trying to say.
Mind you, I did figure it out, but the time I spent figuring it out was time that I would have preferred to spend furthering myself into your story.
...
Incidentally, once I'm past "that", the rest of your sentence falls into place.
*lifts baton again*
The value of ‘it’, here, is fairly extensive. For one thing, he could have saved himself various levels of extraordinary agony and shortened the time it took him to die by at least three full days, if not four. For another, the fate of every single living being on the entirety of the Land would never have hung so perilously in the balance of a single instant if he had simply permitted his fate to wash over him from the start. This is not to mention thousands – possibly tens of thousands - of lives that would have ended quite differently, at least at an entirely different date and most likely in an entirely different manner.
Was fairly extensive.
Was. If you are going to talk in past tense, you should stay in past tense until you have good reason to change.
Okay, this might be just a personal opinion here, but I don't like the use of the word "extensive". "Extensive" means of considerable extent, and extent talks about size. On the other hand, it can also mean "far-reaching" or "broad." In this context, "far-reaching" is very appropriate. But so is broad. Yet you shouldn't call value "far-reaching" or "broad" (again, definitely personal opinion here). Big value? That's marketing talk. Far-reaching value? Um... stock market talk? No? I know what you are trying to say here, but maybe you should consider "The value of 'it' was not to be underestimated" or something like that.
Again, this might seem nit-picking, but when your story starts, you
have to make every word count.
Speaking of unnecessary words...
of a single instant... you already have "hung so perilously in the balance", which some would say is cliché, others might fault as redundant even there. I can overlook those, but if things are already hanging, and not just hanging, but hanging perilously, and they are in the balance (which means things aren't just a few fingers holding onto the edge of the cliff), we don't need to say "of a single instant". We get the picture already.
Last thing on that paragraph - I suggest a revision of the order of your sentences, with the appropriate grammar to support the new locations of your sentences. In particular, switch your last and second to last sentence. Think about it - in the opening sentence, you establish that there is a broad and far-reaching effect, and a positive one at that, of Dexie* being tortured to death. Look at the sentences that follow the opening one.
• You establish that Dexie* would have been spared a horrible torture that lasted for at least three days.
• The value of this torture means that every single living being would have their lives hanging in the balance.
• Thousands would have died differently, both in when and how.
Let's see... individual, entire world, large group. Hmm... not exactly a crescendo of drama. Let's try this:
The torture of Dexie* means that things go badly for the individual. No, actually, they mean that things go badly for a lot of people - Dexie* included. Actually, it is worse than that, because it indirectly leads to threatening everyone in the world.
*Note - we don't even have Dexie's name until now. Trend carefully with the use of your pronouns - delayed identification can be very tricky and can bite the hand holding the pen.
Of course, an argument could be made that all those lives would have eventually passed on their own and that in the end, some good came of it all. Then again, a larger and more forceful argument could be made that the previous argument was completely full of it, that what happened was a tragedy on hundreds of finely-detailed levels and how shameful it was that of all the times this world had required saving, this was the only instance that could be directly traced to a single act of cowardice made by a single man.
"Would have eventually passed on their own..." Hmm. This seems... clunky.
I like the first part of the second sentence, especially "the previous arguement was completely full of it." Heh.
I have to say that this is another example of your run-on sentences cluttering things up. The notion that the world had to be saved because one man was a coward is kind of lost on the first pass. Luckily for you, by this point, the music is building and I'm more inclined to dismiss this - hopefully, the rest of your audience will likely be charmed by your words.
(It’s important to note, here, that the Land was a place that did not so much as ‘embrace’ magic as it was ‘forced to live with it,’ partially due to the Elves, and mainly due to the times of the Dragons, thankfully long since past. Such places, it is written, require an awful lot of saving.)
Eeeerrrttt!
Say what?!?
Magic?
I have no problem with the concept that this world has magic in it, but you need some help in your sequence of thought here!
We went from talking about how the world was in need of saving because of one man's cowardice, and now we are talking about how there is magic in this world. Hello! Sharp corner ahead! Where's the sign?
The key to that paragraph lies in your last sentence. This world needs to be saved from time to time - blame the magic. From there, you can mention the elves (damn annoying point-eared bastards) or the dragons (greedy miserly fools who drive up the cost of living) to whatever else floats your boat about this world that you want to mention.
Because you made this an aside, we don't have to springboard off this paragraph into your next one, but we do need to have this paragraph flow nicely from the last one.
Now, then, once again! Two, three, four...
The first argument then could plaintively state that there was no call to be rude and that if nothing else, the Red Moon certainly bounced back from the brink of oblivion as a direct result and look how much good they’ve done, and besides, it was Amolcus-Rath. Amolcus-Rath and his bloody Rom’Catha, not some piddling army of demonic marauders from beyond the abyss, I mean really now, a man made entirely of stone with the power of drawing down the heavens would be reduced to a pile of quivering jelly when faced with Amolcus-Rath, you can’t possibly have expected a simple trapper to show anything remotely resembling bravery, can you? The second argument could then thrust a finger into the first argument’s chest, accuse it of being a blatant apologist and demand to be met in the alley outside to settle things with a savage beating. None of that is important.
As a side note, as a reader, I am betting that you are picking the side of the second argument, while I pick the side of the first. This is both good and bad, so let me go with the bad. As a reader, I am disagreeing with you, saying that you have it all wrong, it was perfectly reasonable to run when faced with something that nasty, and so I question how you warp things to fit your purpose.
The good news is, since you've got me arguing against your viewpoint (as I see it), you can't deny that you have engaged my interest.
None of it would have happened if he hadn’t tried to hide.
(No shit! I would have tried to hide too!)
He’d been calling himself Dexie those days. Once, he’d had a very simple, specific purpose and when it was done, his masters had hastily thrust a small bag of coins into his hands and told him to get lost. He spent the better part of three decades wandering before he felt he was lost enough. He settled down somewhere in Talterven, built himself a tiny, ramshackle hut up on the side of a mountain and eked out a meager living trapping small animals, ripping their skins off and selling them to the small town a few miles away. The town’s name isn’t important, as the dense forests and thick foliage clinging to whatever scrap of land Talterven’s ubiquitous mountains hadn’t already claimed quickly stole over the smoldering remains and all but erased the stain left behind by that place, but it was where Dexie was when it had begun.
He was too busy trying to convince a local tanner that the rabbit skins he was attempting to sell were far larger than they quite clearly were to notice the old man with the strip of ragged cloth tied over his eyes quietly entering the town without fanfare or notice.
I hate to interupt the flow of your paragraph, but unfortunately, that's what your paragraph did to my reading.
Once again, run-on sentences. You can be very skilled with them, but I think I have figured out how and where and why you do successful run-on sentences and where you fall flat. When you are good at them, see the paragraph earlier, you convey two or more different ideas in one sentence,
but you do so in a manner than flows like water.In this last sentence, you try to convey two different thoughts. The first is that Dexie (yes, now we actually have his name! Well, a name at least...) is trying to scam a tanner (and I was half expecting some commentary on how the tanner was new to Dexie's game or they were old acquintances or something). The second is that he is so busy scamming the tanner he doesn't notice the Old Man of Doom.
Don't give a run-on sentence when introducing the Old Man of Doom!
You want your story to have punch to it, and if you don't mind me jumping ahead a little, you already have the Old Man of Doom come across as an opportunist - hardly super-villain category, if you ask me. Don't hamstring him any further by making his entrance an aside!
To the town, he should be an aside. Without fanfare. That's how you wanted him introduced, fine!
But to the reader, you need to make sure we have everyone but the huge glowing neon sign above him saying, "This guy is one bad-ass muther$%$#!@!!!"
Imagine this scene like you would a movie. Some random guy, apparently, starts laying waste to town (again, getting ahead of myself, sorry). Said guy isn't even in the foreground. Heck, I'm not even sure the camera is focused in on him! Who is he? What is going on? Your reader wants to know!
The old blind man had a kindly, beatific manner to him, a slow, casual shuffle of a gait, a gentle, grandfatherly smile and a demeanor belonging to the sort of person who looked like he belonged precisely where he was, no matter where he went. No one paid much attention to him at all, apart from distractedly returning a quiet, friendly wave or nod of greeting, right up until the moment he began to kill everything in sight.
Okay, so random old guy turns out to be Old Man of Doom! He is, I gather, the main villain. Not very grandiose villianous of an entrance.
He appears to be someone who has decided to slaughter an entire village just because. Sociopathetic? Yes. Crazy? Probably. Dramatic? Not really.
Dexie watched in abject horror, his ears ringing with a vicious symphony of prolonged screams of terror and pain mixed with hideous sounds like bundles of wet cloth torn apart, watched the great, black shadow pass back and forth through the narrow, dirt-paved streets leaving trails of human wreckage in its wake, heard the buildings cave in and blast apart and saw that smile. That terrifyingly calm, kindly little smile as the old man walked with that cruelly casual stroll down the street that was increasingly flooding over with blood, directly towards him.
Or so he assumed, anyway. Dexie, you see, Knew Things. Important Things. Things tied up in the task he’d completed all those years ago, before being so abruptly dismissed by his nervous masters. He thought this must have been somehow connected to it. He thought this old man, this horrifying old blind man and that... shadow... must have somehow been connected to it, must have known, must have come here for him. To find out what he knew. Dexie had often said he didn’t believe in coincidence, which, in the end, turned out to be a Gods-damned shame. He watched this small, frail form, wizened and grandfatherly, slowly picking its way up a street littered with ruined forms and blackened bodies, and realized, at long last, that he was now and had always been a coward.
And so he ran.
Of course, an extremely diligent predator like the old man would find himself compelled to chase after fleeing prey.
Again, I object. He's not a predator. He's just killing things for the fun of it. I think. I'm not sure the old man is doing this because it is fun or because it is just his nature and he really gets no enjoyment out of it. I don't think it is part of any great scheme of his, since you have strongly implied that it was merely coincidence that the Old Man of Doom happened to be there at the same time as Dexie.
But then, while I am objecting to your bluffing the image of the Old Man of Doom as the villain (because I really don't find him to be that magnetic of a character), you can't deny that I am still engaged in your story.
The argument was better though.
And of course, an extremely evil predator like the old man would likewise find himself compelled to punish his prey for running.
Ack! No!
He's a monster, and not a very elegant one at that!
He is NOT a predator!
Had Dexie stayed where he was, frozen in panic, he would have died in seconds. Possibly minutes. Hours at the most. Maybe a day,
Okay, you're pushing it. Drop off the hours and the day part. We already know the Old Man of Doom kills quickly, albeit messily.
but by then the old man would have been long gone. In running - scrambling through thick underbrush, bouncing off of densely-packed trees, scraping himself raw against boulders and steep inclines in his zeal to return to the completely imaginary safety of his tiny ramshackle hut - he was more or less demanding that the old man take his dear, sweet time about finishing him off.
Again, I disagree, but I have a notion about all of this. Explain below.
It was, to be sure, the single worst day of Dexie’s extremely long life,
Whoa, wait, what?
You mentioned before:
For one thing, he could have saved himself various levels of extraordinary agony and shortened the time it took him to die by at least three full days, if not four.
Now you are saying that it only took Dexie one day to die?
Did you mean it took the Old Man of Doom three days to catch him? Or that the Old Man of Doom tortured him for three days, not one, but the last day was the worse?
but the burgeoning horrors in store for the rest of the world lay in exactly what kind of coward he turned out to be. Some cowards flail, some scream, some try to keep running, some offer gold and jewels and richest beyond their murderer’s wildest dreams, and some... Well. There is a certain type of coward who, when all else has failed, when he has been cornered with extraordinarily painful death staring him right in the face, will say anything, tell everything he knows just to buy himself a few more seconds of life.
It is to Dexie’s small credit that he did not know he was precisely that sort of coward until a vast, black shadow descended, a wall of his hut blew in and that sweet, kindly smile beamed down on him. And Dexie, quite unfortunately, Knew Things. Important Things. Things that, contrary to Dexie’s wild fantasies of persecution, the old man knew nothing about.
Until Dexie told him.
Dexie told him everything.
I think,
think, that you meant that it took the Old Man of Doom three days to track Dexie down and kill him, but that's a few paragraphs too far down.
Okay, despite my small squeak of joy at seeing the Beastie again, I think that this prologue still needs some work.
However, I have a suggestion. Take this as you may, because what I am suggesting is nothing less than the radical notion of
re-writing your prologue! *insert flash of lightning and sound of thunder*
Seriously.
It doesn't take that much. You have most of what you need right here already. You know what has happened and what is going to happen, so you just need to change the presention a bit to give it more of a punch.
Now you can keep things the way they are - that's fair. I'm not your editor, I can't tell you "no-go" on your story, "the publishers will never respect me anymore".
But I can say... why not start the prologue in the middle? Bring in the rest as flashback.
Imagine if Dexie was in the process of being tortured by the Old Man of Doom. Instead of having you say that the Old Man of Doom was a predator, you can have the Old Man of Doom say it himself. This way, instead of having your reader (me) object to calling him a predator, you can channel that distaste I have for that wording into a distaste for the Old Man of Doom. Readers love to hate the villain of the story.
Even if you still make him an opportunistic villain, you can display his cunning.
"Now then, my dear boy," said the old man, stroking Dexie's side, over the open wounds from which organs could be seen. "Tell me. Why did you run away like that? That's not very polite of you..."
(Yes, that's how I would do it. This is only a suggestion. You would do best to put that part in your own words, of course, even if you do take me up on my advice.)
So... does this prologue have potential? Yes. Does it have impact? No. It has parts that are engaging and I encourage you to seize and capitalize on those bits, but don't be afraid to change the stuff, even the stuff you like.
*puts away the scalpel after flicking it twice and wiping it with a cloth*
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