Norael

Professor Gaulbert Lizzard woke up and blinked with his eyes. He was laying flat on a cold, rough greyish stone. He turned his head left and right. On both sides he could see an ocean. He sat up and looked around. He was on a small island, not more than half a kilometre in length, maybe a little more. The landscape was grey, flat, dull and rocky with no plant life except of some seaweed at the shore.
He tried to remember what had happened. The last thing he remembered was that he had spilled a cup of coffee over his new homemade supercomputer, the one with the eight-dimensional operating drive. And then he remembered sparks and flashes of light and a series of extremely high sounds and now he was here, right in the middle of nowhere. Could it be that he had travelled in time? Or was he on another planet? Or in another universe!?! He had no idea.
Suddenly he heard a chirp behind him. He turned around and there stood a strange looking bird of some kind. It stood very still on its hind legs and waggled its head. It had three long toes with skin between in front of each foot, and one toe in the back. It had no feathers or fur of any kind. Its skin looked hard, it was grey and matched the colour of the rocks. Its head was about one third of the size of the body. It looked curiously at Gaulbert with its red eyes. Hanging out of its sharp pointed beak was a piece of red seaweed. It chirped again and flapped its small wings. Gaulbert wondered if this strange bird would taste any good, he was rather hungry now.
The bird chirped once again, and all of a sudden an arrow struck it from the right. The bird wangled about and fell dead on the ground. Dark red blood poured out of the wound. Gaulbert was startled and looked around to see if he could spot the hunter. He could not see anything but rocks. Suddenly he felt a cold sharp nib pressing against his neck.
“Stett te hert, din teravess?” a woman voice behind him furiously uttered with rolling R’s. Gaulbert turned slowly around and saw a woman standing there with a spear pointed at him. She was wearing a skin that looked like that of the bird. Her skin was greyish and her hair was long and black. She had dark eyes and eyebrows and looked hard at him.
“Stett te hertim, pes Avinnus?” she said even more furious. Gaulbert stood up slowly. She was still pointing the spear at him. He stuttered and stammered and tried to think of something to say.
“Te grov ka halling, older!?!” she yelled, and kicked him off his feet with tremendous strength. She swung the bird up on her shoulder and began to walk towards the shore. Gaulbert got on his feet and ran after her. He wondered where she was going. She reached the water and tied the bird to her belt. When Gaulbert arrived she had started swimming and was already far away. He saw she was headed for another island in the distance, maybe two kilometres away. Maybe there were other people there. Gaulbert looked back. He didn’t want to stay here. He walked a few steps into the water. It was freezing. He stood to his ankles in water and felt the jagged stones at the bottom tear through his shoes and his white, thin-skinned foot soles. The woman was getting farther away from him. He saw his blood coming up from the bottom like a cloud. A steam of small fish went by. Gaulbert stood still, shivering. The wind was blowing from the north now, and big cold waves rolled against the shore.
“Well, what the hell,” he said and ran out in the water and started swimming. At first he couldn’t move and he heard himself yell with a shrieking voice. Then he started swimming fast and frantically to keep warm. The water was very clear and surprisingly it didn’t taste salt. He could see the bottom about three meters down and it didn’t get deeper while he swam. It was covered with sharp stones and seaweed. Now and then a small fish went by. They were black or grey and had large eyes on the sides of its head. He also saw crabs walking at the bottom. They were often very large and were black with grey stripes or spots. Once he thought he saw a four or five meter long black snake swimming past, but he couldn’t be sure. When he reached the woman, she only ignored him and they swam silent side by side for a couple of minutes. Suddenly the bottom sloped rapidly downwards under them and Gaulbert couldn’t see anything but darkness. They swam onward and were soon halfway across.
Suddenly they could feel the water trembling. From the depths of the ocean he could hear a chorus of rumbling deep voices. The woman looked terrified. She untied the bird from her belt and submerged. Gaulbert followed. Together they stared down in the deep darkness. There was nothing to see. The voices grew louder and louder but still they could see nothing.
Then suddenly, under them about fifty meters to their left, an enormous whale appeared out of the darkness. Its proportions were colossal. It must have been a hundred meters in length or more. While it rose slowly and steadily to the surface, it roared with an exceptionally low-pitched voice that made the water vibrate and shake. Behind it came more of them, all ascending up to the surface.
They looked pretty much like giant blue whales, except that their heads were smaller with darker skin than the rest of the body, they had teeth and light green-coloured skin. One of them had spotted the two humans and howled a long sound. All the others slowly gathered around it, there were ten of them. They were about twenty meters away and all of them stared at the newcomers.
Then suddenly the biggest of them roared and moved forward with great speed. Gaulbert and the woman started ascending frantically towards the surface, but the whale was to fast. It hit Gaulbert hard in the back with the giant tip of its nose. He yelled and felt an agonizing pain before he fainted. The woman slipped swift over the creature’s enormous head and swam down to its three meter long right eye and made a long slit in it with her small knife. The whale stopped and quaked. Dark blood flowed out of the opening. The creature howled in pain and started hurling and tossing itself around in the water swaying its tail up and down. The woman swam up to the surface and took a pleasing breath of air. She was about to swim off when she remembered that the man was still down there.
“Gnir! Kous te stett!” she said to herself and submerged again.
The whales had disappeared now. She could see Gaulbert floating motionless about a few meters down. She swam down to him and dragged him to the surface. He awakened and coughed. She let go of him and started swimming again. He followed her. He still felt great pain in his back. He opened his shirt and saw that it was blue and swollen. They could now see the other island in front of them. They were just half a kilometre from it.
Suddenly without a warning an eight-meter wide cavernous mouth opened in front of them. It was the one of the whale with the wounded eye. Its teeth were taller than a man and glimpsed in the sunlight. Gaulbert was filled with terror and screamed. The upper jaws were slowly lowering down on them when all of a sudden they heard a thump and the animal froze. Blood started streaming out from its mouth and the woman dragged Gaulbert fast out of the way when the upper jaw crashed down. The whale was dead. In the neck stood four or five long spears planted.
“Leakim!” said the woman suddenly. Gaulbert turned around and saw that the woman swam towards a strange looking round raft. It was probably a whalebone construction covered with whale-skin. Onboard were seven men, all grey-skinned like the woman, but with red and green outfits.
“Avinnus!” said one of them. He had long black hair and a beard. “Kvir hur te fnat?”
“Groth! Te stett fne gnir fys Gnelder, hljae!” she said. The men looked at Gaulbert and laughed. The woman and himself were helped up in the raft. The inside was covered with blue coloured-paintings of whales and men in boats and mountains in the distance. The man with the beard knocked his chest.
“Leakim!” he said. He took a small plate with red fruit on it and offered it to Gaulbert. He ate with a grand appetite. Then he was given a bottle made of skin with sour milk. He drank and leaned back against the side of the raft. He was unusually tired. Before he fell asleep he could see the island coming closer. It had the same rocky landscape as the last one. Amidst the rocks he could see stone-houses and grey people doing their everyday things.
When he woke up the next day he was lying on a soft mattress. At first he thought it had all been a dream and that he now was safe back in his own bed. But when he sat up he felt the pain was still in his back. It was not so agonizing as it had been before, though. He was in a tent made of whale-skin. The floor was a big flat stone. He stood up and went out of a door to the right. Outside were more tents. They were built with long whalebones as poles and covered with whale-skin. He was on the top of a hill. Down at the seashore lay the dead hundred meter long whale with its right side down. Masses of men and women in blue, red, yellow or green outfits were skinning the tip of its tail. He climbed down and approached the head of the creature. Thirty persons were dragging out the teeth from its mouth and twenty others were cutting off the ten-meter long tongue. By the side of the eye on top of the head stood fifteen men and women. One of the men waved to Gaulbert and signalled for him to come up. He climbed up on a rope ladder made of seaweed that they threw down. The man who had waved at him was the one with the beard who he had seen the previous day.
“Gnelder fyst! Leakim gromte sygn!” the man said. He pointed down at the enormous eye of the whale and gave Gaulbert one of two two-meter long whalebones he was holding. The others had matching bones and all of them gathered in a circle around the eye. By Gaulbert’s side stood the woman who had swum with him the day before. She smiled at him. They put the end of their bones in the rim of the eye and pressed them down the side of the eyeball making a squishy sound. Gaulbert followed as best as he could. They stopped when their bones was halfway down. Now all of them began to press the other end of the bone downwards, slowly pushing the eye upwards. Gaulbert did the same. The eye came out with a big squash and blood spluttered in everybody’s faces. Five of the persons dropped their bones and pushed the eye away from the hole and down on a big round raft lying on the rocks below. The raft was manned with about twenty persons with small oars and pushed a few meters into the water. It was then manoeuvred up a big river running down from the hill and lifted inside a storage house.
In the meantime Gaulbert had climbed down from the whale and wandered down its side to see what happened there. The men and women had completely skinned and removed the flesh on the first six meters of the tip of the tail leaving only some vertebral bones and the giant tail fin. The skin and meat were shipped up the river like the eye. Gaulbert rounded the tail and went up the other side. When he reached the mouth again he saw that they had finished cutting off the tongue and were almost finished pulling out the teeth. He stared down in the darkness of the throat and stepped curiously up on what was left of the tongue.
“Hello!” he shouted to check if there was an echo.
“Hello!” came the answer back. Gaulbert laughed and tried it again.
“Is there anybody there?” he shouted.
“Yes!” came the answer. Gaulbert was so surprised that he lost his balance.
“Help!” he yelled and slid down into the darkness.

Norael

Well? What do you think

eleutheromaniac

You're anxious for advice and criticism, which probably means you're fairly new to writing, and probably fairly young, too. Given that, you shouldn't take the following criticism too harshly. Hopefully it will make you a better writer.


-"Professor Gaulbert Lizzard woke up and blinked with his eyes."

This was just bad, especially for an opening line. Suggestion, just to give you an idea:

"His eyes were scratchy and dry when he awoke."

Something more along those lines. You don't need to say he blinked (this will be infered by the fact that his eyes were scratchy and dry), and you certainly don't need to say he blinked his eyes.

-Too much passive voice. And too many subject-first sentences. A number of sentences start 'He', 'She', 'They', 'It'. Check out the 'Hemingway Disease' thread in the advice forum. Should be on the third or fourth page.

-This whole piece still needs a lot of work. I'm guessing this is a first draft. Before I can even comment on the story, this needs to be rewritten. I just couldn't get into at all. It had no life, nothing I could really grab on to. But, with a little more work, and a couple more rewrites this could be a good piece. I suggest you rewrite this from scratch, and repost it. "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." ~James Michener. Some people just need a couple of tries before they get it right.

And it usually takes longer than a couple of hours to get comments on your posts, especially this early in the morning. If you want tips on how to get comments on your posts, check out the "Getting Comments on Your Post" thread in the advice forum. Oh, and you can click on the 'watch this topic' link in the bottom left corner, and you will get an e-mail if anyone responds to this thread. So you don't have to sit there waiting for someone to reply.

Again, sorry if this critique was harsh. The last thing I want to do is turn someone off of writing. But if you're serious about being a good writer, you've still got a ways to go. I just hope this critique encourages you to improve rather than discouraging you.

__________________
Augmented Reality

Selorian

Hello Norael,

Great to have you here! Conrats on posting your work for the first time. Thats always a bit nerve racking and scary. I can tell that you have the desire to write. I hope that having that desire will allow you to take this criticism and use it to become better at what you want to do.

I agree with eleutheromaniac on your story. It needs some work, but I can see potential. One of the biggest things I noticed that will change the entire piece is that you tend to tell instead of show. Describe things through actions.

We'll take your first paragraph. The opening line needs to grab your readers attention, intrigue them, get them to want to read on. Here it is as you wrote it:

Here is a rewrite doing what eleutheromaniac and myself talked about:

Crashing of waves aginst rock penetrated his subconciousness, dragging his mind up through the depths of darkness that enveloped it. He opened his eyes and seen nothing but ocean. Cold penetrated into his hands as he pushed himself up from the stone. He looked around him. No more than half a kilometer in length, the island was small and save for some seaweed that had washed ashore onto the flat gray rock, totally barren.

That is by no means perfect but hopefully it shows you how to mix things up some and captivate the reader. Don't let this be discouraging, just use it as a building block to work from. I look forward to seeing the reworked version. Good Luck.

Cliff





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