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Nolina's profile
AGE:
52
LOC: Austin, TX
GEN: Female
LAST LOGIN: October 16
LOC: Austin, TX
GEN: Female
LAST LOGIN: October 16
I don’t even want to say how long I’ve been working on Crazy Street—changing it up, adding a whole damn plot, rethinking, editing and now doing the version that brings it on home. It’s not my first novel either, but that’s another story.
The main obstacles to getting it done & getting it right: I do other writing that eats up time and energy, e.g. historical research and advocacy that involves journalism and compulsive emailing. Every so often, a poem pops up too. Anything to keep me from dealing with Crazy Street. But I’ve got about 250 good pages & will persevere.
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<!--StartFragment--> 1 Marianne walked into the shade of the hackberry trees edging La Mesa Creek and down into the drought-hardened mud of the stream bed. When she caught sight of the legendary snapping turtle, his enormous shell poking out of the last remaining pool of water, she stopped moving to watch him and tried not to sweat any more than was necessary. She was alert to the fact that nomadic crack heads could be lurking nearby among the white winged dov...
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1 Marianne walked along the line of hackberry trees looking at a creek that was no more, dried up by the worst drought anyone could remember. She caught sight of the legendary snapping turtle, his enormous shell poking out of the last murky pool, and she stayed still, trying not to sweat any more than was necessary, aware of the possibility of nomadic crack heads among the white winged doves and feral cats. Marianne had moved here from a more tasteful part of Austin and was still getting used...
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Marianne, August 13: High 103, Low 80 One-handed gardening can be dangerous. I was spreading hay around the Cubanelles with my foot and admiring the contrast of chartreuse peppers against pale hay when I tripped and fell, spilling my screwdriver. When I remembered that there was no more vodka, my heart fluttered, but not in a good way. The morale-boosting aspect of vodka in cold fruit juice is crucial if your life has been reduced to a never-ending cycle of sweating, showering and remembering...
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Okay, but you've still got a ways to go to be the cheesiest. I like that snappy last paragraph and you are writing good dialogue in general, but do some tightening up, just for the sake of flow and to keep that fast noir rhythm. Like you don't need to light "the end" of her ciggie and repeating old twice in a graph, etc. Watch out for overwrought language like "delicate act of despair"--this is too small a moment for that. I don't know that this is all cliche, but I also wonder why people wou...
I am not sure I get the point of reading an abandoned chapter, but I will say that the characters and the dilemma engaged me and I wanted to read more. It's a difficult situation to make entertaining, but you do it. If there was something more about the past tragedies that resulted in him living with Aunt Clara, more backstory, it would help. Of course, the reader probably learned in a previous chapter what his father turned into, but I didn't and I wanted to know! Also, I wanted to know more...
I like the images of violent nature and all the action in the first one and the way the last line is somewhat puzzling (foundation of what? the tree, a house?) The second one begins with strength but "vultures salivate" doesn't work for me and since the vultures only work on the dead I don't think they work with broken limbs and also "salivate" conjures up a kind of malicious intent whereas they are just animals eating what they eat. To me, the hard thing about haiku is every single word is s...
I think the relationships could be clearly stated and they are not...the father is killed...the daughter is living away from her mother...but she is missing her parents. Wait a minute, who, what which? I think you can work on your writing and it will get more interesting, more deep and multi-layered than it is now. Slow down and show us more of the characters' lives before diving into sex. The sex is very graphic but it wouldn't be too much if there was more emotion/thinking involved, somethi...
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