ferretting around & around

Hi Maggie. Here is the link for your tale: http://www.abctales.com/node/558223 I struggled with the punctuation in this. I wondered whether it was done on purpose - two thousand words and only three sentences - it kind of suits the breathless excitement of the narrator. However, it's a sod to read. If this was a deliberate stylistic ploy then I suggest going the whole hog and removing ALL punctuation from the story. If you did this then you would need to find some other way of helping the reader - perhaps breaking it into paragraphs. The punctuation aside, the story reads quite well - if you read it out loud - but on the page, the big solid block of unbroken words is quite daunting. Spare a thought for the poor reader!

I guess I'd go along with Gareth, Maggie1. Just a couple of other things about style. Little things, but they can make a difference. First off, just a word on cliches: 'pitch black', 'freezing cold, 'jam packed', etc. They've been used to death. You could make your writing more vivid by trying to come up with some alternatives. Also, perhaps you could tighten up a bit more on the sentence structure in places: 'she... had a look of fright on her face, she looked pale too', for example. How about 'she looked pale and frightened'. Or even just 'she looked scared'. If she looked it, she'd be pale anyway - sort of goes without saying. Just thoughts, though. Ultimately, it comes down to what you want to say and what you're happy with.

"she looked pale from fright" would cover the bases!

Hi Maggie, I also found there were a couple of places where the story swapped from past tense to present tense and back again, for instance 'he noticed that when she laughs she throws her head back and her long black hair glistens in the light and her eyes sparkled like Diamonds that danced when she speaks', which can feel a bit jarring to the reader. The story is definately engaging though, so well done!

I think it's fair to say, Maggie, that the art of writing (and I'm not pretending to be any great shakes) is not writing, but REwriting. Unfortunately that's the boring bit...!

I don't know... I always find that to be the best bit. All the hard work should be done by that time.

bashers and swoopers, as Vonnegut said