 DaystarsMom 2008-01-19 . chapter 1I really like the way you portray Conrad and Julia's relationship. You generally seem to do a nice job with angst and internal monolog, and you use both to advantage in this spare little piece.
Most of my nit-picks on this one are stylistic stuff -- in something this short and focused, style tends to stand out, for better or worse. I've mentioned the tense slippage in your narrative in my comments on your other pieces, so I won't repeat the details here. The other thing that stuck out for me was your consistent use of short-short paragraphs, even when you're not doing dialog. There are a number of places in this where you want the impact of a one-word or one-phrase paragraph (for example, "Love?" and "Not for us.") When you have so many short paragraphs, the impact gets diluted for the ones you want. You can't do anything about the dialog itself, of course, but you might be able to combine a few lines here and there, or add a sentence or two of description or stage business to a dialog paragraph. And later in the story, when you're doing more internal monolog, there are places where you could combine some lines into one paragraph, to get more emphasis on other lines (if that's the effect you want). |