Brigit's Flame August 2014 Challenge (Week Four) - Welcome Home

[fawatson]

Title: Welcome Home
Author: Florence A. Watson
Written for: Brigit’s Flame August 2014 Challenge (week four)
Primary Prompt: Blood
Length: 635 words
Author’s Notes: (1) This story is part of a longer work that is still in progress and, within the timeline for the longer story, should come before the ficlet I wrote for Week One. The focus of each

Comments

Your BF edit!

[keppiehed]

I must ruefully inform you that you drew me as editor again for this piece. I’m sorry! You know the drill by now. :)

I read through this carefully, but I decided against giving a line-by-line for a couple of reasons. One is that you already have heard me, like a broken record, about commas and such, and there isn’t much more I can say about that, other than going through the exact nature of which commas are a problem and why (which I would be happy to do, btw, I just fear that it would be tedious. But please let me know if you want me to give you the reasoning behind the rules about them). Besides, I didn’t see many errors in this piece in relation to them, anyway. They are slippery little devils in the best of times, and I think that no one but a pedant would see a problem here.

You have a good grasp of the technicalities. I would move to the next level with you and advise you to watch out for your adverbs. I had a hard time absorbing that as a writer, myself, since we naturally want to describe the setting and we don’t like to have our most descriptive words taken from us. But most times they add to the redundancy of our writing. Consider the few exaples you used (not that you went overboard here by any means) lovely display or rapidly beating. In the case of the former, you need to trust that you have set the scene (which you did) properly, in which case there is no need to add the word “lovely”. We understand long before the word that it is, indeed, lovely. And in the case of a beating heart, of course when you explained her pulse was in her neck, beating with shock, it would be nothing other than rapid. So that, too, is unnecessary. Trust your verb, then, or choose another, but leave the adverb.

That’s all I have for you. This was a particularly charming piece and I felt as if I were right there. Good work, as always. You’re making me earn my title as editor! :)

Re: Your BF edit!

[fawatson]

Ah, the 'less is more' rule! Yes I do see what you mean about the adverbs. They belong to the cutting room floor (and will be relegated there when I put all four parts of the story together).