K, I wouldn't have cut nearly as much as you did.  If it moves your character to tears, the reader shoukd know why.

njc wrote:

It wouldn't be the same thinning.Try taking a sequence maybe 30 to 50 words long.  Consider sensation, awareness, emotive response, communication, and action all and each as events.

In =Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance=, a book that I don't know whether to recommend, the narrator recalls trying to get a student to write with focussed specifics.  He wanted her to write an essay; she chose the USA as a topic.  Too broad he said, forcing her down through her state, her county, her town, neighborhood, and street, past her home and down to a single brick in the front wall.

She filled page after page with vivd descriptions of that brick, its colors and imperfections.

You don't have this fictional student's inability to focus, but your descriptions do not always stand up to close examination of the physics and your logic flow is sometimes irregular.  That's why I'm suggesting this detailed exercise--on the small scale, please!  If it works for you, you'll be able to carry the lessons to your larger work and the questions will nag you when you need nagging--and only then.  They'll pipe up more often at first, but experience will show them their place in the team.

It wouldn't be the same thinning.

Try taking a sequence maybe 30 to 50 words long.  Consider sensation, awareness, emotive response, communication, and action all and each as events.  Place them in order, first to last, cause before effect (efficient causation).  Write first with nouns and verbs, then with modifiers of color, number, and place.  Look for the best description you can with those, and only then seek to flesh them out.  Choose modifiers that are specific rather than abstract.  Look for modifiers that (eep!) synergize with what they modify (but avoid cliche).

There's a wonderful line from a famous writer's description of Ted Williams: "... radiates the hard blue glow of high purpose."  The abstract has been given a feeling as concrete as concrete itself.

Janet's remarks are on point here.  And much depends on the action and sequence in which this must fit.

amy s wrote:

Sam came downstairs to the crisp overtones of bacon hanging on the
air. Eggs sizzled and popped on the nearby stove. Dishes chimed as the table was set, taking their places next to the warm-up cascade of silverware.

You've got synesthesia here.   Sizzle is to the ear, bacon's aroma to the nose.  And bacon's aroma is so strong that it will overwhelm the eggs.

There might be another lesson here.  If you go to art school, even for photography, they'll want you to learn to draw first.  Pencil and paper is the simplest medium and requires the least learning of the medium freeing you to learn the essence of representative art, and that essence is to unlearn, to learn to see with your eyes instead of your brain.  To learn to see a thing as your eyes show it to you, not as your brain says it must be.  Because you are trying to present something to someone else's eyes, not directly to  his brain.

This might be the unwinding of your sorting socks.  Or maybe not.

Let me offer another analogy.  An electrical engineer learns first how to study the behaviour of an electrical circuit as a function of time.  But very soon the study turns to characterizing according to frequency or 'moment'.  The tools are the Fourier and Laplace transform, which have nearly the same algebraic form in practice, and have the great virtue of turning the calculus into algebra.  Hairy polynomial algebra, but algebra still.  (And today we have other transforms, and I don't know the beginning of it: Z transform, wavelets, ... ... ...)

The beginning student sees the circuit either in the time domain OR in the frequency domain.  The accomplished engineer (which I am not) sees it in both domains at once, and understands the effect of a circuit change in both domains at once.

The accomplished artist sees with both the eyes and the brain, at once.  Socks AND their sorting.

I think the crux of my confusion about your style is that adjectives are a communication tool. People understand nouns, but those don't evoke emotions. Adverbs force action, taking the reader someplace they might not want to go. However, adjectives make people drool, describing situations that they relate to.

Not always true.  'sizzle' is a verb (sometimes noun), not an adjective.  Strunk and White will tell you (perhaps paraphrasing Twain?) that the adjective hasn't been built that can get you out of a tight place.  And in the opening matter of An Exultation of Larks the author points to the glory of English's huge vocabulary, for instance the differing shades of 'paternal'' and 'fatherly'.

Let's see how I might have treated your incident, bearing in mind that grammar mood and grammar flow and topic flow are always involved.

How old is Sam?  It affects how he moves down the stairs.  Is he hungry or sated?  It affects his reaction to the smell of frying fat.  And of course, he is neither a vegetarian nor an observant Jew or Moslem.

Here's a first try:

The aroma of hot bacon had reached the second floor.  Sam's hunger became insistant and he padded down the stairs, the smell of sizzling eggs joining the bacon as he went.

A bit pointilistic, perhaps, but you might try pointilism as an exercise, just to pull you toward center.

Regarding the thing that I'm trying to teach and haven't yet mastered, let me quote not =The Elements of Style= but the out-of-print =The Elements of PROGRAMMING Style=, by Kernighan and Plauger.

The eternal wisdom to which I draw you attention is one of their foundation maxims:

Say what you mean, simply and directly.

It's easier to do this in program code than in prose, but it's worth working towards CONSTANTLY.

There's a book by Jacques Barzun called =Simple and Direct=.  I disagree with enough of his maxims that I can't wholly recommend the book.  But he was a great teacher and his =From Dawn to Decadence= (written in his 80s and 90s, when he thought he 'might have a few years left'--and subsequently revised!) ought to be required reading.

Oops, right.  Kat got the Mistress's wand.  But what's happened, and to happen, is not the result of intervention.  Hmmm.


Tilly seconded the now-enhanced Anver.  Will she show any effects?  Oh, and is there some kind of truce between her and Kat, or is Anver just the fence between them?

When Alina's staff exploded, and all the linked staffs separated and survived, was that 'natural' or was it the result of someone/something intervening?

amy s wrote:

Hmmm. I thought it was an autocorrect of 'flossing'. What does that say about me? Not good...not good...

It just means you never visited a whaling museum.  They have one on Nantucket.

Oh, I haven't mastered that stuff.  I'm still working on it.  (I got a belly laugh over the point.)

Cheese

KHippolite wrote:

I owe it a thorough flensing when time permits

Five vocabulary points to KH.

Cheese

I beg to disagree, Janet.  I'm afraid I flayed it.  I'll probably find stuff on second pass, too.  Sorry for the grim news.

Quincunx

janet reid wrote:
njc wrote:

Guarded by those poison-teeth tentacles.

Overshadowed by the teenie-weenie poison-teeth tentacles. wink

Either way, the working parts are hidden by the tentaclulo-dental apparatus.  But those little surrounding nubbins are visible in the male, if the tentacles are in their resting position.

Guarded by those poison-teeth tentacles.

And who says the male mar has just two?  Put one between each pair of toothed tentacles.

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Back on Erevain now.  If you want a repub for =The Child and the Beast=, say so.

Also thinking about the names in Harsan's family.

Octagon rematch.

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No, back to Erevain ...

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A few more edits to B1Ch90 (by 2350 tonight) and then I move on.

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Okay, I've done the edits on B1 Ch90 (which doesn't belong to B1).  If anyone wants I'll do a new version so you can get points; just let me know.

I've alternated Shogran's PoV with Jamen's.  I'm not at all sure (how) it works, but I've also tweaked the storyline a bit.

If you want the new version, please speak up.

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Likewise ... but maybe more so.  I know the thematic end, but not the exact plot end.  Sometimes you just have to start.  Though for me, it was more important to see that my prose could stand up to review.

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Further distracted by a big gap (chasm, crevasse, canyon) I found in the story logic just after the start of Book 2.  I'm writing up some notes.  This will give me the ... opportunity .... to work out some longer-term plot stuff.

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I spent much of yesterday on the road, to and from a concert in Methuen.   (Peter Sykes on the organ, an extravegant use of his talent in an organ-and-trumpet Christmas concert.   See http://www.amazon.com/Holst-Planets-Tra … es+Planets .   A recording that surpasses the orchestral original, with magnificent liner notes on the tragedy of EMSkinner.  "Old Man Skinner sure knew how to build an organ!")

In the quieter moments of the drive, I put together some things that I've been seeing develop in and regarding Shogran, and overnight I did three reviews and wrote up some of Shogran's perspective on =The Child and the Beast=, now sitting quite improperly in the end of Book 1.  I'm going to see if I can integrate that into the chapter without too much work, and if so I may post the edits.  I won't repub unless someone wants to do a review.