lemonavenue

(Note: ^The above title is silly. Apparently, you cannot edit thread titles in this forum. Go figure.)

Here's part of the first chapter of a story I'm working on. I wanted to wait until I had the whole chapter written but forces have been conspiring against me for the past few days, preventing me from completing the chapter even though I am dying for critique. I'm going to post some of what I have here and add more when I feel I have reached another decent stopping point or when I have finished the chapter. Hopefully, the latter.

STUFF I WANNA KNOW:
1. Historical stuff: Is my information good enough for the average reader to buy, or am I writing out of my ass? (I did some pretty deep research for this story a few years ago. "A few years ago" is the key phrase here.) This story takes place in the early 1800s.

2. Is my character a nifty guy? This story is supposed to be character driven, so making him likeable is a big concern of mine.

3. What sucks? Really, tell me!

4. What else sucks??

5. Does anything else suck? Please!

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Somehow, in spite of his inescapable need for blood, Lucas had managed to hold together a reasonably uneventful existence up until now. He was satisfied with the income he received selling chicken eggs and ferrying horses. The eggs came from home raised chicken and he sold them out of his house to people who then sold them on market, having a distaste for the hullabaloo of the weekend market himself. The cottage and lighthouse where given to him by long-time friend and honorary family member Julian Goodfellow, who passed away five years ago at sixty-seven. The chickens came with the house.

Starting his horse shoeing career required a little help from his half-brother, Thomas, who after vigorous persuasion loaned him the money for tools. It turned out to be an exhausting business with terrible sacrifices to sleep, a vital element to his health and one needed in excess, at least compared to humans. Going out in the sunlight forced him to wear heavy clothes and a hat to protect his albino skin, only to burn anyway, usually his neck. He supposed he should have felt grateful for the privilege to walk in the sun. Yet for all the discomfort and bother it caused, he would rather sleep the day through. Standing shoulder to hip with warm blooded horses irritated his hunger as well, mere hours after his last blood meal.

An ox named Bully, who lived in a stable on Lucas’s property, supplied him with modest rations. Bully was about the only animal big enough to endure his hunger and survive, but even Bully had limits. If Lucas lavished himself with filling meals regularly then every few months he would be conspicuously minus an ox, an unaffordable situation on many levels.

Yet he shouldered his burden of half-full, half-empty discomfort every day without complaint, even when his frustration grew so maddening he could do nothing but hide indoors and pray to God for sleep.

At least he had pride now, at least he had integrity, satisfaction in himself, a piece of the unattainable clenched in his fist. God be damned he would not let that go. Though he never felt completely happy with his life since deciding to remain in Boston near his half-brother, in the city where they grew up, he justified the cost of living a decent life with the belief that one day, perhaps on his death bed, he would look back on his sacrifices and feel really, truly happy for reaping the rewards of a difficult road. In his experience happiness happened suddenly and surprisingly and always left behind a pleasant memory. Before returning to Boston, these happy moments were few. A lack of comfort seemed a small price to pay to exchange an existence numbed by murder and thievery for one of peaceful, monotonous living. He doubted he would ever marry, though he fantasized after a family with terrible longing. He would have been happy to die in Boston, among the humans with whom he once believed he could never live, but that dream was now flying apart like the ashes from a burning house.

Too often he let worry get the better of him. Even during his calmest moments he looked slightly neurotic, brow knit and gaze distant yet focused as if watching a travesty lumber towards him. Because of his apparent youth, people often mistook him for having a skittish, awkward personality and disinterest in others. He kept to himself most of the time yet greeted neighbors with a smile. His smile was, unfortunately, tired and weighed down with distrust. In reality Lucas was a deep thinker painfully aware of his own short-comings, wanting only to live out his years in an uncomplicated, quiet situation; a desire so strong that even though the crack in his dream of retirement had been evident for years he attributed it to paranoia.

The sun had just set on first night of 1816, five days until Lucas’s forty-first birthday. One could say he was aging like a fine wine, judging by his youthful looks, yet this was far from the case. He stood in the tower of Julian’s lighthouse, inside the glass pentagon on the very top where he lit the beacon each evening for the last ten years. The fire from the tiny lantern he would use to light the beacon barely penetrated the darkness engulfing the beacon room at this hour. This fog was too thick to see the oil lamps dimly glowing on the streets below. The stars and the sea were lost in the murk. He pulled his coat around him, feeling the chill created by the freezing winds rushing outside the windows which held in a lonely silence.

He did not need the lantern to find his way in the dark, only needed it to light the beacon, yet its orange glow was a comfort in a place where the snow on the balcony was the only indication of a world inside the fog. Tonight he felt uncertain of everything. It had been a long time since he looked to the future with so much dread. He might even slip on the top step and tumble down the winding tower stairs to his death—if death could come so easily.

As Lucas left the base of the tower, its beacon gazing brightly over the sea, he ran into Thomas shivering in front of the tower door in the snow. Thomas’s hair was fading from light brown to light grey and beginning to recede, changes he seemed to mind little. He liked to joke that age made him look dignified. At least, Lucas assumed those were jokes. He smiled at Lucas’s surprise through a curtain of frown lines. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be late.”

Feeling embarrassed for forgetting their arrangement to meet after the new year, Lucas hastily brought his half-brother into the foyer and poured him a glass of bourbon to warm up with in front of the hearth. Thomas was a year younger than him. It surprised Lucas to find himself worrying about Thomas’s health when he was still as healthy at forty as he was at eighteen. He always believed that his good health came as a benefit from his father’s side of the family.

“Congratulations on ten years,” Thomas said, raising his glass as if to toast. “Mom would be proud.”

Lucas half-heartedly repeated the gesture. Their mother passed away eight years ago, five years after Thomas’s father, Henry. Lucas’s father, a vampire his mother knew as Matthew Willoughby, though that may not have been his real name, was killed by a mob less than a block from his mother’s house three months before Lucas was born in 1776. He had been her last affair after marrying Henry and an incredible brush with death. She could never explain why he decided not to kill her—when they met, she had no idea he was anything less than human—but after an unusual pregnancy, Matthew’s reappearance near her house confirmed her fears of an illegitimate conception and something much worse than she had ever imagined. It haunted Lucas to learn that his own father had probably returned for the express purpose of killing him before he was born. Nor could he explain his mother’s decision to raise him after such a traumatic encounter. Even though Henry did little more than allow him to live, Lucas believed that this, too, was an act of incredible kindness. While he lived under Julian’s guardianship and survived off chicken blood (at least during the early years), his mother paid Julian for every expense and sent Lucas books on everything from ethics to geography and letters encouraging him to read and learn. When Julian could no longer provide enough blood for Lucas’s growing appetite, forcing Lucas to live with Julian’s relatives on a farm, still his mother sent books and letters. If not for her presence, he and Thomas might have been no more than related strangers. Her kindness cast a shadow Lucas knew he could never live down. ================================================== =======
To be continued ...

Author's Note: Edited out some silliness. For future reference, writing for four hours straight makes me nuts.

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Mike & the Bots
Making fun of my bad posts since 2/14/08.

Truth-Teller

Too much telling; not enough showing.

Lack of dialogues; lack of action.

No tension.

lin

Your troll-bait thread title worked.

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lin

I don't know why half-vampires are sillier than whole-vampires, but it's been done a few times. Blade, for one.

You need to use more hypens. horse-shoeing (you know they are caled farriers, right?)
home-raised, etc.

Oh, wait...ferrying horses. I get it. But that's not how it's spelled and it isn't usally used like that. I would say his income shoeing horses, then use farrier the second time.

It's rough. You need to polish things down. Little things like "until now" in the first sentence. "Now"? Is that when this is?

You often extend sentences and complicate them a little much trying to slip in exposition. "at least compared to humans" is a good example.

It's a style and tone I would almost call "quaint", like 18th century narrations. Which could work if it fits your story and sustains like this.

Good luck

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lemonavenue

For this part of the story I didn't use a lot of showing because I didn't want to drag Lucas through an entire day where most of the action I would be describing would be irrelevent to the story. I wanted to get things moving quickly, so I used exposition. I tried to make the exposition interesting, but apparently I did not. Is there any way I can make it better?

There is dialouge, but if I included all of the dialouge I have so far in the story then the stopping point would be even worse. As I said earlier this is only a pieace of the chapter I'm working on, the first 1,300 words (roughly). The entire document is about 1,700 words and the missing 400 are almost all dialouge.

I have a fear of posting long stories and assumed that I would not get any readers if I posted the entire chapter when it is finished, which may be a few days or a week from now. So I decided I would rather post a snip-bit and see if it interested people.

There is internal tension, but now that I think about it it may not have been tight enough. Hmm.

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Mike & the Bots
Making fun of my bad posts since 2/14/08.

Necromortis

I liked it (but then, I've always been pretty partial to vampires).

It lacks action, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Something major doesn't have to be happening every other page for a story to be engaging and interesting. I, for one, enjoyed learning about Lucas's history (although you may want to proofread it, because some bits were confusing - you mention a Benjamin, who I assumed was meant to be Matthew, but if it wasn't a typo, then I'm really confused). You didn't go on and on, but you gave me enough information to really begin to understand the character, and to begin liking him (oh yes, a very nifty guy indeed). It was engaging and informative, and well written.

Now, give me more! Quiero más!

~Christian

EDIT: For the sake of being well-rounded, I have to add some criticism. The grammar in parts is rough. Polish it (like lin said).

lemonavenue

I probably should have checked my book when I wrote about ferrying. Ugh, it was even right next to me the whole time. I have no excuse for that. It's really just a shitty encylopedia of words that were common in the 1800s but it doesn't include conjugations or many examples of how each word was used. I only use it because of how easy it is to find what I'm looking for.

I never payed attention during English in elementary school. If I knew I was going to want to be a writer when I grew up I would have done differently, so thanks for the info about the hypens.

I was playing around with sentences a lot as I wrote this, so that's probably where all the weird exposition comes from. I guess it worked out though because it sounds like you got the impression I was looking for. Even though this is written in third person I want to keep the POV on Lucas tight, so I'm trying to use a bit of his speaking style.

Thanks for the help.

PS - Sorry if my topic seemed like trolling, I'll change it now. The forum I'm used to isn't very disiplined and everyone seems to enjoy this kind of silliness, so coming to WF.com is a bit of a culture shock.

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Mike & the Bots
Making fun of my bad posts since 2/14/08.

lemonavenue

Thanks, I'm glad someone who likes vampires also likes Lucas. I do love the concept of vampires but find that most of the fiction unappealing, so with Lucas I wanted to tell a story that was a little different from the typical stuff a dhampir goes through (agnst, revenge, being Blade, ect). I was worried that Lucas would be too radical for the genre because, deep down, he is basicly Joe Everyman. At least that's what I was going for.

Thanks a ton for mentioning that typo. When I changed his name to Matthew I thought I only wrote Benjamin once, but that mistake is fixed now.

Grammar has never been my strong point, even though it's the thing I tell everyone to work on.

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Mike & the Bots
Making fun of my bad posts since 2/14/08.

Just Jim

Your heading got me here, so don't feel bad about it. It was fun.

Your writing is very smooth and keeps moving. I enjoyed that you let us know he was a vampire in a subtle way. It does seem dated, so maybe the following should be moved earlier in the story, so we know it's a nineteenth century piece.

The sun had just set on first night of 1816, five days until Lucas’s forty-first birthday. One could say he was aging like a fine wine, judging by his youthful looks, yet this was far from the case.

It seems others have already pointed out the words, typos etc.

I think you're on the way to a good story

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http://jimsstories.wordpress.com/
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The Oddville Press
Accepting short stories, poetry, and art.

lin

Don't make the mistake of responding to TruthTeller's spurts as if they were serious, or that he understood your piece or even read it.

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