Autumn

this is the beginning of a story- haven't written one for quite a while and would like some help with the genre- it is set in iceland....


Liz had heard about living in the arctics. She'd heard that someone like her, someone who'd grown up with concrete and pleasant gardens, someone whose ancestry lay in pebble-dashed cemmetries full of roses and blossomming boughs, someone who was always busy, that someone like her might suffer something akin to a near death experience at first sight of the great white. She'd heard tell that the startling blankness so triggered the mind that it ran almost in reverse and replayed lost memmories, retrieving all the details, colouring the scenery with scenes, populating the landscape with ghosts. And that this was something akin to being very, very old, drifting off, and finding yourself again in a loud, yet jaded armchair by the fire.
These ideas had accompanied her as she slipped in to a slumber on a flight to Reykjavik. Stirring slightly, she thought she was in a wood, she thought the twigs were snapping their fingers in her ears. She thought the trees were creaking and sighing and speaking to her in strange, clacking rhythms with strictural endings. Round, then abrupt syllables were drumming through her skin, playing against her bones. Lol-lal-lay-li-la-lok-lil-la-lith-lik-lak-laa-luk-lal-lil-lil-el-li-za-beth-el-liz-za-beth-el-li-za-beth-she thought she heard her name.
Shaking herself awake, she glanced around the interior. Passengers, using pattering tongues were conversing in hushed, slightly sombre tones. At first she imagined they were speaking in morse code until she realised that they were probably all Scandinavians who knew each other. A woman unzipped her patent black snakesskin bag and wriggled her nose as she touched up her make-up only to smudge it again when she couldn't resist softenning her rather stern travelling companion with a lean and tender kiss. The stewardesses, giggling, fixed each others hair. Men in suits adjusted their collars and pretended not to go to sleep. A child stifled a cry of surprise as he woke up to find he was snuggled in to anold man's armpit. And the woman next to her began to write, gingerly at first, keying the extraordinary shapes and symbols of another language in to her laptop, brushing shoulders with Liz as she did so, they exchanged sabre-tooth smiles...

Olly Buckle

Resonant, wisps
Who is taking the steps?
Why should the earth roar?
What is in the tundra's cache?
Why does the mammal despair?
What does this have to do with my past life?
It all sounds very dramatic, but it doesn't convey anything to me yet.

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Google Olly Buckle and click on my Associated content page, or find me on youtube.

I had a tremendous advantage in life, at the age of eighteen I caught polio and for eighteen months was totally paralysed except for my eyes. Milton Erickson

Autumn

hello Olly
thanks for your consideration
on reflection it was reading fairly obscurely, i've given it a re write

Roxane

There are tons of evokative images here, and I really like some of them, but I think its hard to be jagged from one image to the next too quickly; simply too much. Additionally, the last sentence is too long for my taste, try to lighten it up, give us more understanding of what it going on.

Hope this helps, and Im curious to see what you do with it.

Mike

You need to create an environment. Oh, you've done some work in creating images for us, but without a point of view (a patch of ground for the readers to land on), we're just clouds in the sky.

You obviously haven't selected a main character. Look at the pronouns: "I heard about..." "filling your eyes..." "her frozen basin..." - it's a constant confusion to figure out where we are.

Too purple? I don't know what purple means, aside from a color and archetype, but to me, it is too wordy. Slow down on the imaging. Create a nexus that will be your readers' point of view.

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- Mike

Autumn

thanks for the input Mike and Roxane, have edited with some of what you said in mind