OddGodHMK

This is the opening of a chapter of a novel I've started. Please lend your thoughts!

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Dave Kendall stared out of a window that wasn’t quite square; something he had constructed in his early days working with the Salvage. The job was poor and the sheet of plastic simulating glass wasn’t of even thickness or transparency; in some places it looked like it had melted, been sprinkled with motes of dust and then solidified once more. But like everything here, it would suffice.

Outside of his round office, which stood two storeys taller than the buildings in the four cities making up the Sanctuary, he could see the physical embodiment of bleakness. The same bleakness that came every day, every night, like it had for as long as Dave could remember. There was the sky: black. The only hint of the sun was a wandering miniscule dot which only just stood out from the thick, encompassing haze.

Ahead was an empty track that separated the north-west and north-east cities. The term track was wrong; Dave thought it looked more like a hand fan, starting off at a point here outside the Sanctuary’s core, then opening out wider and wider until the cities met their ends and there was nothing left to enclose the fan.

All along the track were mounds of snow. No, not just mounds. Drifts. The winds were so fierce and hostile that instead of the snow settling into a sheet a foot deep or more, the wind blew it into great drifts in places and left the ground almost bare in others.

The bare, barren ground. Hard and cold.

This never-ending, dark winter was all Dave had ever known. The books he had managed to recover sometimes spoke of a time before, when the sky was blue and the sun was a bright, life-giving orb. When the only thing that changed the colour of the sky were the clouds or the night as it came and went. And sometimes, he had read, the sun would dye the clouds a brilliant pink, or paint them red or yellow.

That was before the Collection.

Now the ever-changing patchwork quilt that was the sky turned from blue to white or yellow or red or pink no more. Now it was black and only that. The sun’s bright light was reduced to a feeble glow by the constant haze, and it did wander a pointless path over the sky.

He had read of a time when there were seasons that came and went in an eternal cycle, trudging from winter, to spring, to summer, to autumn and then back to winter again as the wheel rolled back to its beginning. The snow would come in winter, then it would melt and the plants and trees would grow again in spring, then in the summer there would be warmth and sunlight and the days would grow long and the nights short, then in the autumn the plants would wilt and the trees do away with their leaves to survive that snow as it came again.

Not now. Now there was just winter. Never-ending winter. Never-ending wind. Never-ending snow. Never-ending cold.

This was all that was left.

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Boring Internet - www.boringinternet.co.uk - because the rest of the internet is a waste of time

lilacstarflower

Didn't see any major problems with this.

There are two parts where you double-back on what you just said which is off-putting e.g. "mounds of snow...not just mounds"

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One day I will live by this code:

Fossy

Are there words in that first post? I'm guessing there must be, because Lilacstarflower very kindly read it for you. Perhaps if it didn't look like a fly had crapped all over my screen, I might be able to read it.

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Originally posted by Sam Winchester.
Fossy's good too. She gives good advice.

OddGodHMK

Fixed

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Boring Internet - www.boringinternet.co.uk - because the rest of the internet is a waste of time

Fossy

Sorry I didn't get back to this before OddGod.

I quite enjoyed reading this. Clean simple descriptions, I like that.

This last sentence bothered me, and loses the impact you intended with its passivity. Quote: "This was all that was left." Maybe it would read better as, "This is all that is left."

Nothing else really jumped out other than a few passive sentences, although they're not jarring.

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Originally posted by Sam Winchester.
Fossy's good too. She gives good advice.

Fleabyte

I always wonder, when I read descriptions of a planet with a dead or dying sun, how anything survives. I'm assuming that will be explained later? I like what you've written - it's just something which has always bothered me.

Your descriptions are masterful.

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“Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.”
Dave Barry
thegoodflea.com

Sabsz

I really like the idea of this!

I didn't catch typos or grammatical problems. Though, I just skimmed through it. However, the first sentence didn't really catch my interest. After reading on, I thought it was very interesting.

I love your last lines.