My life experience is that blackberries are vinny too — but apparently there are different varieties. Here, though the problem is my crap writing! The wild asparagus is being left on the cutting room floor.

I love all this feedback so I can see where I failed to write what I meant to say. And yes, crawling into the bbys is bad, but better than the alternative in this case.

Thank you for your comments.

Also…I might choose death before diving into one. Talk about bleeding!

Also, wild asparagus is an early-spring plant; blackberries are a summer plant, so there really isn’t much overlap.

the password is

lemmein

Maybe I’m too late. I wanted to say that what I have read here is OK, but I would start with the third paragraph, and it would have to be reworked a bit, perhaps.

I’m not sure I would read this, though. I am not a fan of these kinds of stories, and you would have to have a big hook in a page or so, or be someone like Jacqueline Carey.

This probably didn’t help you, but I wish you luck.

that site is wonderful — I notice Ursula K. Le Guin is missing from the list of essential writers in sf or fantasy . . . hm. . .

Yikes indeed, and I know it is daunting, particularly since it seems to take precious time away from your writing, but reading at least some of these books will help you to write better in the story that you have chosen, and that is the object of the exercise.

CH Cherryh’s website has her journal about the process of how a prolific and much published professional writer works, and I think that looking at might be helpful to you as well.

Best wishes for the work-in-progress…

That’s the only thing that left me feeling a bit puzzled.

It would have to be something pretty horrible to send me diving into a blackberry thicket.

I just didn't know how to “do” dialogue tags.

They can be tricky. You may find Strunk & White’s helpful with that.

For what it’s worth, I actually liked some of those writerly phrases JoB suggested you reconsider, so I vote for keeping the following:

displayed a miracle
swallowed a berry fat with juice
shuttled more berries into his mouth
creepy chirps

Yikes!

Glad to see a fellow Zelazny fan!

@author

Zelazny’s Damnation Alley is, I think, essential reading for anyone writing about mutant predators, as well as being an incredibly good book.

And if you are writing about babies born in labs then you really need to read CJ Cherryh’s Union stories; she has thought through the economic as well as moral consequences of such an advance in science.

You might also like to note that Mallory is the surname of one of CJ Cherryh’s most famous characters; your heroine is going to have to be pretty remarkable to stand comparison with Signy, with or without the crew of the Norway…

thank you for taking the time to do this.

I did go to your link and read the rest of the chapter.
This is all very fine. Just lovely.

As above, I’d suggest you maybe think about pulling backstory and explanation of all kinds out of the first page. You might drop in a teaser at the beginning . . .

The last blackberries she ate came from the fields above the settlement.

She wasn’t watching for raptors. It was too early in the year. They wouldn’t start diving out of the sky, stealing children till mid June, when the chicks hatched.

and you might add just little feather-like touches of unexplained weirdness.

But the big weird-and-strange
and the fictive world
and the family
— this is only IMO —
maybe work better if you put it in an ongoing scene (which you do anyway) than if try to crowd it into Page One by ‘telling’ us.

Cool work.

Everything I mention is fully fixable . . . or else it’s authorial decision and doesn’t need to be fixed. Hope some of what I say is useful.

And I expect my questions about the world-building and the fictive economy get answered in Chapter Two or so.

I love this kind of story.

I was so looking forward to your comments, and you did not disappoint. I’m going to take some time to think about everything you said.

Oh, if anyone clicks on the linky above, Mikal is now Kaje.

Three or four thoughts on this one.

–
First . . . you’re explaining us to death.

You explain how Mal found the berries and where they are and how she got to them and that it’s a bad idea to be picking them and she’s going to get yelled at for it and that she’s spent a month waiting for them to ripen and that it’s safe enough to go out and get them and that she’s of an age to go looking for berries . . .

We don’t really care that much about the berries.

You tell us about the gate and how far away it is and how Mal’s the right age to go through it . . .

But perhaps the best way to give us the ‘essence of gate’ would be to run the character through the gate. Bang, it goes, slamming behind her. “What the hell are you kids doing outside?” goes the gatekeeper.

You explain Mal’s relationship with her mother
Maybe put Mal in the front room with her mother and let them act out how they feel about each other.

–
I guess the second comment is more of a question.

Is that the attack of the beasties-from-the-sky part of the plot action? That is, does the outcome of this action change anything that happens in the rest of the story?

Or is the attack An Exciting Incident to start the story?

If the plot begins in Chapter Three when a mysterious stranger shows up
then you might consider starting the ms with Chapter Three.

–
I am wondering about some parts of the plot.

Why does Mal hide the existence of these berries? If food is so scarce berries make a big difference in the diet and some girl spots a food source and doesn’t tell anyone about it because she wants to scarf it down by herself … then I’d beat her when she got home, too.

How could people who live in part by gathering not know what’s growing within ten minutes of their own gate? A patch two miles away, ok. But so close . . . ?

If the countryside is full of fearsome monsters, why do they let young kids wander around loose?

If food is scarce, why is the labor of these two teenagers (essentially full-grown workers,) not put to use? Why are they not grinding flour or weeding fields or hunting, instead of wandering the countryside at their leisure?

If it’s hard to get kids and one has to qualify . . would you beat your kid?
Not saying it’s unlikely, but what seems to be acceptance of this by the community seems odd.

–
And two niggles:

I have just the smallest puzzlement about the blackberries. Round here, for two weeks, there are half a million blackberries.
Why one rare clump of them?.
Also, the local blackberries are a bush of long thick canes, full of thorns. Not a vine or a dense ‘net’.
Might be a regional thing . . ?

Finally, I spotted one or two ‘writerly’ phrasings you might reconsider.

displayed a miracle
that treasure ripening and vulnerable
stifled a joyous yelp
swallowed a berry fat with juice
shuttled more berries into his mouth
no special species around here (which is also a huh?)
creepy chirps,

linky linky

So she does think she’s dying because she has no idea what’s happening to her. Ma knows, though, and quit beating her when the bleeding started because it makes Mal super valuable. Most children are “grown in a bag” and people have to qualify to get them.

The opening chapter is about Ma turning Mal in for the bounty, so we find out this is unusual pretty quickly.