Well, for me it's pretty weird.
For one thing it isn't speculative fiction.
And it's ugly.
And I feel like I've given birth to the twoheaded baby.

But here it is, all 3,5 pages of it:
http://www.geocities.com/littleonions33/story1.html

I really need help with the language, though. Writing this made me bang my head against the wall with frustration, because my grasp of the English language is just so limited. I could sense that there were other turns of phrase out there that would fit much better, if I only knew them!

So if you read this and something the characters say or think sounds stilted or unnatural, please tell me. I could use some criticism.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy it nevertheless,
onions

I hope you don`t mind my presumption Melanie, but I took a good look at your story and whilst I was most impressed by your characterization of Hector and Burgher (Christian remained something of a cypher, but then this was only an excerpt right?) I did notice a tendency to overdo the description that reminded me vaguely of a certain Robert Jordan. Yes, it`s good to give the reader an impression of a scene or an individual, but you have to trust them to use their own imagination.

The only other shortcomings I found were in a confusion over settings (Asturias is a region of Spain, and yet your story - from the German names to references to the Hungarian uprising of 1956 - seems to be set in Austria. To correct that I took the liberty of substituting Austria wherever the locale was mentioned) and in not starting a new paragraph whenever speech occurs in the piece.

In my view it aids the reader in following the story to initiate a new paragraph when a character speaks and to break up large chunks of descriptive writing into more digestable segments. A promising start nonetheless and I`d be interested to know if this was just an experiment, a short story or whether this was the first instalment of your first novel?

See PM for amended text.

"Asturia" isn't so much a confusion, as a reference to...never mind. I might as well write Austria. The people I'm reading this too would understand the reference, but I can see if you're confused! Then again, I might as well go and change the names that I chose in order for English speaking tongues to not trip over.

I'm really baffled at the "overdo the description" criticism. I feel that if anything, I tend to overdo the dialogue so that I might as well just write a play. Also, I may be overexplaining (the bit about the tax thing, for instance)
Can you give me a specific example?

This whole thing started out as a monthly writing assignment for my creative group. This month's was, appropriately, "Gifts and Gift giving". I'm supposed to read this out loud infront of, like 30 people. Now I've written it, it seems inapproriate however (and not just because of the length), so I might just go and start a new story with the same theme. *sigh*
The same thing happened with the last assignment.
Well, every author has something that keeps him going, and writing stories that don't fit to the assignments given may just be mine!

This is an entire story making a point of it's own, no excerpt. I didn't tie up all the points because I didn't feel I had to. Are you missing closure?
Christian is just a side kick. He doesn't have much of a character. What he seems to be is influenced entirely by the balance of power, and of course by Hector's perception of their respective positions.

The heart of the story is that I was basically exploring a character. It was going to be a tragedy, but it turned savage on me. After I'd written it I became repulsed. I thought: This is a piece about the opposite of beauty.

ETA: okay, I read the PM and I see what you would change...interesting. Thank you for that!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: His Noodle Girl,