All Comments on 'Asteroids and Athletes Ch. 09'

You're writing is decent, overall; good character dvelopment, realistictic dialogue, and a good story line.

With that said, I find it somewhat pedantic, jouralistic, even.; this happened, then someone said/did this. Too what, where,when &why.

Good writing indirectly tells he same story, whicle adding more adjectives and adverbs to set the seen and mood. The nouns & verbs tell the what & how; the adverbs and adjectives bring the readr INTO the world & story, and make it a a apart of them..

Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

You wrote, "I told them that I felt like it was me who should be thankful...

On eof the biggest mistakes writers make is unnecesary word, both rookies & veterans, (I've been writing & editing 30+ , and still fight with excessive use of 'that'. It's my bane of exsistence. lol)

There's one you could drop., leaving:

'I told them I felt like it was me who should be thankful.'

The second is based around 'me'. In the scene, youre doing the speaking, so it's superfulous to repeat who' talking.

The 'me' ties into another unnecessary 'who's talking' phrase, so for simplicity, I'll combine to to for the result.

This leaves us w-:

I told them I should be thankful.

Now, this is a plain, jane, blah sentence. This is where you can use adjective &/or adjectives to spice thing up, shoke some emotion, nervous tension, whatever YOUR creative mind comes up with. I cam make suggestions,, but I don't have a working editor relationship w- you, which would help me know what you wanted to portray.

The beauty of getting rid of extraneous & unnecessary word is it turn gives you 'room' for the interesting words, without wasted space.

I come from a writing time when characters when not simply a digital mote. A word, (comprised of characters), meant extra column space which led to increased paper useage, (cost).

Then, a typesetter having to physically pick out the word's characters, make sure the spelling was corrext, then make it fit in the column without a goofy hyphen, (more work/cost).

The next generation of typesetting, were I cut my teeth, wasn't that difficult, but it still was extra work..

All of this is to explain while editors of yore got the reputation of hell-fire, cussing, raving madmen. They wer constantly bereating writers to 'get to the goddamn point'. The majority of this bame from the newspaper world, but, magazine dirtors could have their moments.

Book editors, who would with individual authors, were somewhat gentler, though no less stern. They developed relationships, sometime multi-book relarionships, which eased the the tension, they became collaborators, more that proofreaders.

They'd proof, but also work on story lines, help authors unpaint themselves from corners. and generally be a partner, (the goods one did, anyway).

The mantra to remember is the fewer words the better, but concentrate on unnecessary, and duplicitous words, sriving to add color & 'spice' words... but don't get carrying away.

There definitely IS too much of a good thing.

geoD

"LatineX" = No such thing.