Aren't you lucky I'm in a critiquing mood today?
Ha.
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Originally Posted by cyberspecter
Joe pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down heavily.
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You can't really sit down heavily, but you can sit down "with a sense of heaviness" or somesuch.
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A woman occupied the small bed, her face peaceful. Various tubes protruded from her arms. Wires, he knew, were arranged over her body attached to the little electrode patches that fed information collected into the heart monitor.
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Damn, I have that Athlete song in my head now ("you've got wires, going in, you've got wires, coming out of your skin"). The "wires..." sentence made very little sense to me. So little that I can't really tell you what's wrong with it. Just... rewrite it!
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Her hair was thin and wispy, ethereal- like smoke, preferring to spread out rather than rise.
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Okay. I think it may sound better in a format such as this, as the "preferring to spread out" image wasn't too strong. Make your own simile, of course
. "Her hair was thin and wispy, ethereal, like smoke crawling sideways under floorboards." It's tricky to think of any sideways-smoke situations, I'll give you that.
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The fall she’d taken while wandering around aimlessly, unaware of who or where she was, hadn’t been that bad, but the doctors were of the mind that it was better safe than sorry.
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I think you're trying to fit too much information into one sentence. And
what exactly is better off safe than sorry? You're missing a "to be", I think.
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She had always been so vibrant, so bright eyed. This was a woman who’d lived by two tenets: Trust in God and A brain is a terrible thing to waste.
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You capitalise one, not the other. I understand the second phrase seems too long for this, so why not use inverted commas?
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If her life were a story written by God, then it would seem He was a master of irony.
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Good line.
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Joe was so tired. He put his head back and stared at the ceiling.
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Sorry for what I'm about to write because it's so localised to my brain. The putting back of his head gives me the image of some guy putting his own head back onto a shelf. Maybe "leant" or "rested".
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All those little holes in each panel. He let his eyes trace the holes looking for answers,
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Needs a comma after "he let his eyes trace the holes" to separate the subjects.
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Your decisions were simple and uncomplicated.
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Simple and uncomplicated together are kind of redundant.
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A person lived until they died.
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Ooh. Hole in one.
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It drove her crazy to see her only child sit for hours on end staring blankly at a centipede crawling under and over dead leaves and twigs when he was supposed to be raking the yard.
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Lovely image of the weaving motion, though it sounds a bit like the centipede should be raking the yard.
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Hell hath no fury like a mother snubbed.
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Great.
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Billy Stine in third grade, there she was, Band-Aid in one hand and a lollipop in the other.
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Sorry. I have a beef with bullies named Billy. (That was a nice tongue twister, no?) It's such a classic name for them.
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For all that she pushed him, he had to admit she pushed herself just as hard if not harder.
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Comma needed after "hard".
Loved that line too.
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When she was in a good mood, this even got a rare smile.
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A really sweet line, this. But I think "one of her rare smiles" might sound better, since like this it sounds like the smile itself is one of a dying breed.
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“Not this time,” he whispered, blinking away a tear.
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YIKES. Now I usually have at least an inkling of the ending but here I was absolutely stunned. Kudos on that. Now I'm simmering over why he did this. Which is why flash really kills me sometimes.
A good story!
).
