CoH Writer's Guild Review

[fixit]

By the second paragraph I was hooked. Loved it. Anything that starts with barfights is good in my book.

[Myths n' Wraiths]

Origen stories rule. Getting to know new characters is always worth while and this was no exception.

The way the story hopped around was a little sudden but it served to develop two seperate plots that you ended up intertwining rather well. Keep it coming, Tog.

[Ockham]

Who's the true villain here? The thug or the one who made him worse?

Nice gray area. What's a mad scientist without subjects?

I agree with MW, there were some point of view shifts happening the lost me for a second, but those are easily distinquished with line breaks.

Example:

It was a typical Saturday night on Tavern Row. People were filtering into the bars. The night was just starting and it had promise. Soon enough things would change. They always did. One guy would stand too close to another, or dance with the wrong girl, or not dance with the right one… Whatever started it tonight, the outcome would be the same. There would be a fight, then a brawl that would spill into the parking lot. Moments after that, ‘he’ would show up. No one knew his name. The joke was the smart people called him ‘Sir’. The truth was that the smart people were long gone before he arrived.

*****

The old man slipped into his dream state. He had long ago mastered lucid dreaming and was able to control his dreams perfectly. In this one, he was going to receive the Nobel Prize had had been denied all those years ago. His work in biochemical engineering was legendary 4 decades ago. His work in genetics revolutionized the field. Still, he was never held in any regard beyond ‘quaint’ by his peers. “Too meek”, they said. Not the sort of image to catapult science to the 21st century. This night, in this dream, he would show them. His creation will arrive and stand before them, daring them to not see the man for the genius he was. That he IS.

I started to get the feeling the old man was mentally projecting the thug.

Unless... that was your intent.

Hmm... I gonna have to keep an eye on you.

[Tog]

Thanks for the feed back. I welcome it. I didn't start writing fiction until fairly recently and a lot of what I've done have been experiments to see what sort of style I can do, and what I can't. In this one, I wanted to have to convey different events and locations at the same time, hence the jumping. I'd always considered the line breaks to be more of a "the next morning" tool as opposed to an "at that very moment, across town" tool. Thanks for the tip.