Dear Jud,
Three-handed Bridge deals a fast-paced, quirky lesson in love, self-fathering and, yes, bridge.
Dr. Bryant, the story’s deadpan narrator, can make room for his dear friend, Dr. Percy Panderwall, at the bridge table, just not in his bed. But Dr. P—an aging Scarlett in khakis—won’t accept defeat even when his opponent is a young and masculine, albeit imaginary, graduate assistant of Dr. Bryant’s own making.
This erotic fantasy of the perfect man begins as a harmless story in Dr. Bryant’s journal but soon takes an unexpected turn. What follows is a surreal journey back to his childhood and the abuse that has scarred his life. In the end, Dr. Bryant learns, with Dr. P’s help, how to be a father to the abused child in himself. He also learns that his perfect man has been sitting across the bridge table, drawling dirty Latin phrases in a Georgian accent, for the last decade.
I have published poetry and one short story with university presses, and I would like to work with a publisher who understands the value of gay literary humor/fiction and how to market these works to mainstream readers. Three-handed Bridge will appeal to readers who read David Sedaris, Jincy Willett, and Augusten Burroughs.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I am prepared to send you sample chapters of this finished 90,000-word manuscript upon request.
Sincerely,
Chapter One
eeh-ahh, eeh-ahh, eeh-ahh
White blossoms whirl around his head—a whooshy blizzard of spring. I am watching, but I am not. Blossom windrows heap there and here, drifting against the campus brick, “chilling the lap” of the May-green bush, of his neatly pressed khakis. I move . . . closer . . . behind a tree . . . watch. There is something dishonest, misleading in the wintry spring scene: a cast of billions all conspiring to be something not a single one is. “Try not to imagine,” he sighs. I move . . . closer still . . . feel his breath. He turns, enters Penn Hall, just another new square cell in a sprawling virus of blocky campus buildings.
♠♠♠
The far-off HONK! of a car horn wakes me.
“Heavens!” My iced tea spills all over the porch. It’s going to be sticky—I just know. God, that was a stupid dream. Slow-motion, voyeuristic, metaphorical slop. Dreams are so damn poetic—my dreams anyway. That’s probably because in my waking world, I avoid poetry like the dentist.
My waking world? My trees and my house, and this sunny fall day. That’s all the poetry I need. And that’s all the poetry I’ve ever expected from my world. Why in the world should we expect real things to rhyme? The screen door, as if in response to my question, yawns open with a light breeze.
May and I bought the house in 73, the same year we hatched from graduate school together. We were both Victorian Lit majors, and we were in love like Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, if you know what I mean. You probably don’t, and that’s just fine.
We decided to begin our (short-lived) life together by buying a beautiful ante-bellum home on Main Street USA—something almost Victorian, at least as Victorian as we could get without moving to England. We were fortunate to benefit from the dying market and a dead seller, a confederate grand dame survived by her three ruthlessly childish, adult children, who were all too eager to get their hands on some of that ante-bellum money.
Ante-bellum, in our little college town of Harding, Tennessee, almost invariably means a million-year mortgage or termites . . . or both. But like I said, May and I were lucky. The feuding children, in their rush to fortune, overlooked the fact that this three-storey stately manor house on Main Street USA was absolutely, one hundred percent termite free. (The million-year mortgage was an inevitability; there was no use arguing about that.)
The feuding children didn’t seem much concerned about the house at all. During the two torturous months it took us to close on the house, they kept calling the property “Mama’s woods.” It was possible, I soon realized, that they hadn’t even noticed the house tucked behind the four magnificent Live Oak trees gracing—overwhelming really—the front yard. But of course they had to know where Mama had lived all those years, didn’t they? Hadn’t they lived in the house themselves?
At any rate, we rescued a house that might have become a guesthouse or, infinitely worse, a frat house; and, being elevated, almost instantly, to the rank of savior, we were also, almost instantly, inducted into the Harding Historical Preservation Society . . . with the following conditions, spelled out in a letter from the induction committee: 1) the porch that wraps around the house was to be “kept” in “pristine” condition (interesting wording considering many of the boards were “rotten” when we bought the house; 2) we were not to change the windows or “uglify” them with distracting, non-period window treatments (also interesting wording since the period window treatments would have been made from old burlap tote sacks—I did my homework); and 3) the roof was to be restored, at our earliest convenience, to its “ideal” condition and appearance, whatever that meant. We could have snubbed the committee (and saved tens of thousands of dollars, mind you), but to be honest we loved having so much society; so we agreed—and went straight to May’s father for a loan.
The Society never mentioned one word about the four Live Oak trees: proud yet curiously bent natives of North Carolina—just like my family. We discovered years later that our dead seller’s second husband’s grandmother’s “house girl”—yes, we had trouble doing the genealogy in our heads as well—had come from North Carolina with four arm-length saplings on the wagon, four little pieces of home, now enormous, sprawling, magical creatures dwarfing my house. It turns out that the seller had inherited the house from her second husband after her children had already left the nest. So, actually, her children might not have known about the house behind what are now my rare and magnificent trees—relatively rare to Tennessee at least.
When I saw the oaks for the first time (I also overlooked the house behind), I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as if, after twenty years, I had just walked into my grandparents’ front yard in a dream. I was a child again and climbing the trees as little boys do. It was as if, after all this time, I had come home to North Carolina with my freshly ringed wife to show everyone the family man I had grown into.
May and I imagined our unborn children swinging from the thick, twisted, impossibly long branches—branches that defied gravity, precariously reaching farther and farther each year. May imagined darling yet frenetic little ruffians playfully fighting over the hanging tire; I imagined mischievous froward brats, broken limbs (human and arborous), tree surgeons and ambulances.
Besides my grandparents’ trees, I’d seen one other Live Oak in a little Spanish town in the courtyard of a very old and famous church—so famous that I have completely forgotten its name. Never mind. The lower limbs of the famous Spanish tree were supported by permanent metal poles. This tree was 400 years old according to the plaque next to it; our Live Oaks were only around 150 years old, mere teenagers really.
“Hi-deeee!” Dr. P lilts, emerging suddenly from the oaks.
“Mercy! You’re early,” I start. I never hear anyone coming up the walk. “Tea, Dr. P?”
“Lo-word, honey. You’d think it was the middle of summa,” he replies, handing me a pillow he’s embroidered himself. (Subtitle: Why yes, I would love a glass of tea and I’m early because I want to enjoy the warm autumn day on the porch with you before our bridge opponents arrive; and I’ve made a pillow for the dormer-window seat that looks so bare.) You see, Dr. P always drawls exactly what he means, and you can hear exactly what he means if you pay close attention.
“Thank you,” I say, pouring the glass of tea and reading the Latin phrase embroidered on the pillow in burgundy thread. “This isn’t another one of your dirty Latin jokes, is it?”
“No, honey. It’s just some little ditty about comfort,” he replies, taking his iced tea.
Comfort is important to Dr. P like nothing else. He provides it, mostly in the form of pillows, but also through his deep-rooted presence. The pillow is just a symbol, often with something dirty disguised in curlicued Latin that no one except he himself would giggle at.
“I’ll take it upstairs later,” I say and hug the pillow to my chest. It is redolent of his cologne.
We sit for about thirty minutes without saying anything. Dr. P rocks; I watch the much appreciated breeze tickle and rustle and tug at the oak leaves.
“You’re gonna to have to do something soon about those lee-ums, honey,” Dr. P drawls and stirs a Sweet&Low into his iced tea. “Darlin’, those lee-ums are like magic hangin by a thray-uhd.”
He’s warned me about the oak limbs at least once a month for the last ten years. Like me, the trees have aged over thirty years since I first saw them, so you can imagine the magic hanging by a thread in my front yard now.
“Yes,” I say simply. “More tea, Dr. P?”
“I reckon I’ve got it like-I-like-it right now,” he replies.
“So, how was your vacation?” I ask.
“My vacation?”
“You were gone for three days. I called you every day, but no one answered. Did you go somewhere?” I ask.
“Oh thah-yut. I had to see a girlfriend,” he replies. “It’s a fine day. Seems like summa’s neh-vuh gonna end. Honey, this poach is a prize. A prahhhhz, I tell you.”
The porch—although still perfectly pristine—thrums a pleasant eee-ahh, eee-ahh, eee-ahh under Dr. P’s rocking chair. The fickle breeze, the odd Mockingbird and the occasional passing car on Main Street beyond the oaks are motives coming and going, but Dr. P’s eee-ahh, eee-ahh, eee-ahh is a cadence, a relentless reminder that’s he’s not going anywhere.
I point to a squirrel darting up and around the oak closest to the porch and say, “I used to climb my grandparents’ oaks like that with my—”
“Yes, I reckon you did,” says Dr. P when I don’t complete my sentence, a habit he’s grown accustomed to. eee-ahh, eee-ahh, eee-ahh
"With my brother," I almost said. When you’ve known someone for as long as Dr. P and I have known each other, there’s just not that much that needs to be said anymore. He knows me better than I know myself. So why talk at all? Well, when you think about it, his rocking-chair eee-ahh, eee-ahh, eee-ahh says it all. It says, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” And that’s all—at this late stage of the game—Dr. P really needs to say. Really.
However, there are those times when Dr. P feels he must say more (the Lord bless his soul). Like a zeitgeber, orientation week at the university every fall semester awakens his dormant libido, rousing a grumpy Dr. P from his sexual aestivation. And he’s not exactly a morning person—unless, of course, he’s had sex; then he’s up at six o’clock rustling up a lumberjack’s breakfast and singing eighties songs in the shower. Yes, Dr. P and I had a sexual relationship—a very brief one—when we met, in the fall of course—all those years ago . . . in the eighties. Oh, I don’t mean to say he gets itchy only in the fall. What I really mean to say is that he goes insane in the fall, like a frantic, 45-year-old woman who’s convinced her eggs have one leg in the grave, or like a cat in heat hiking her hindquarters and looking around to see if anyone’s noticed. Maybe it has something to do with his birthday being in September. Anyway, he always gets that look in his eye the first week in September.
This is how it goes: Dr. P decides we should rekindle our sexual relationship; and then, when I try to put out his fire subtly, always subtly, he goes stark-raving mad (and they say men don’t menstruate). It begins modestly, almost cordially. He starts calling me honey. Then it snowballs into his asking, begging really, to stay overnight after our Friday evening bridge games. Then, when I refuse, he gets pissy, and his porch symphony goes from thrumming to squeaking to the sound a nailgun makes—more like uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh than eee-ahh eee-ahh eee-ahh—until I, always I, finally have to be the one to ask, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“With me? With me?!” he cackles. “There’s nothing wrong with me!” (uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh) (Subtitle: I am not the problem; you, Dr. B, are the reason my eggs are growing dangerously old.)
“Well, you’re rocking like an autistic savant and look like you’re constipated. Are you?”
“What.”
“Constipated?”
“No!”
“Well, good.” I say. Constipation—as well as other digestive eventualities—is always a good diversion from the real topic.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” he snips. “I’m . . . I’m . . .”
But before he gets his chance to unload, Drs. Alten and Colburn, bourbon and organic Trail Mix in hand, respectively, are already mounting the steps to the porch. The oaks have grown so weighty around the house that you can’t see anyone coming up the walk until they are right up on you . . . or until the leaves fall—knee-deep—in early November.
“The nelly old queen looks constipated,” Dr. Alten grunts and goes into the house.
“See,” I say and follow suit, the screen door twanging behind me.
♠♠♠
“What is it about professors’ crotches?” I ask as Dr. Alten deals the first hand. “Let’s be honest. I am neither the most attractive 56-year-old professor on the block nor the manliest. I doubt seriously that anyone ever stares at my crotch when I’m doing my laps around the mall on Saturday mornings with you other old farts. In fact, I’m positive they don’t; I would have noticed. I certainly do notice when my students stare at my crotch. Is it the old professor pants? The floating crotch? Come on, the . . . what do they call it these days . . . the parcel? . . . the package! I mean, come on, the package they’re gawking at isn’t even that big; but female and male students alike . . . it’s quite distracting . . . staring nonstop at my crotch. Is it because my crotch is at their eye-level and they’re just too lazy to look above the belt-line? If their eyes were lasers, I’d have a big hole where my crotch is.”
“Docta B, Could you possibly say cuh-rotch one moh tahm?” snips Dr. P in his slow, noble Georgian accent. You really have to pay attention to know when Dr. P is snipping. He speaks so slowly that the whole world has to stop and wait for him to finish his sentence, and it’s always worth the wait.
Tennesseans tend to twang like a rusty screen door; Georgians lilt and linger, stretching and exploring every shade and nuance of every syllable, finally letting the word loose to play in the air—a form of word worship really. Tennesseans just twang.
Dr. Colburn laughs. “Maybe they’re staring at your crotch because they can’t believe how small it is, man.” He looks to Dr. P for agreement—which he gets—and crunches on his trail mix, which is mostly pieces of wood with the odd, rock-hard raisin.
Dr. P adds, “Like when a youngstah stay-uhs at a monkey in the zoo.”
“Which one of you pussy-ass faggots dealt these cards?” Dr. Alten grumbles.
Dr. Alten’s bottle of Wild Turkey is half empty (and believe you me, he sees that bottle as half empty); so not only is ORNERY the best we can hope for right now, but he’s already started insulting the predominant sexual orientation in the room. You see, years ago he quite unexpectedly found himself playing bridge every Friday evening with three gracefully aging queers. This came as quite the surprise to Dr. P, who was sure Dr. Alten was gay. But then we simply adopted him; and he, depending on how much he’s drunk from his bottle of Wild Turkey, grunts questions like “Which one of you pussy-ass faggots dealt these cards?”
Bridge (The bridge lessons are set apart in separate boxes throughout the novel)
To arrive at the answer to his question, a typical bridge-table diagram might be of help: (There is a diagram here of a bridge table that Urbis formatting doesn’t allow.)
North: Dr. Colburn (old hippie)
East: Dr. Panderwall (pissy, climacteric confidant)
South: Dr. Alten (drunk, ornery hetero)
West: Dr. Bryant (myself)
Bridge, you see, is a sophisticated mental exercise. Every move, even seemingly insignificant communication like shuffling and dealing the cards, has been carefully designed by some needle-nosed little man in England. In short, there are rules—crystal clear, imperial rules that, when broken, evince gasps and sighs and condescending smiles from every compass direction. So, moving right along to the first tidbit you must know: there are two decks of cards. One player deals the cards while his partner “makes,” or shuffles, the cards. The player who makes the cards places this deck on his right when he’s finished shuffling; which means—try to follow me now because we are indeed on our way back to answering Dr. Alten’s stupidly grunted question—the cards would be to the left of the next dealer (in this case myself), which means the player who dealt the cards last time was the player sitting across from the person who made the cards last time (the same player who placed the cards on his right (my left), which means the last dealer was, of course, Dr. Alten himself—to explain why we are all giggling like three old queens and Dr. Alten is grunting repeatedly “What? What?”
When the giggling dies down and Dr. Alten has finally understood why we were laughing in the first place, I say, “I had a dream.”
“Well, darlin,” Dr. P says, “If it had anything to do with little black bo-wees and little white gulls playing together, I do believe that dream’s been dreamt.”
“No.” I laugh. “There was a young man standing outside Penn Hall in an errant blizzard of spring blossoms—”
“You’ve had that one before,” Dr. Alten interrupts. “Play the game.”
“No I haven’t,” I say.
“Well, Docta B, I beg to diffuh,” snips Dr. P. “You had that one yee-uhs ago. Right buh-fo-wa the di-vo-worse, I do believe. And you’ve told us about it several tahms since.”
“Oh, yes,” I say. Of course I did. “Well, God bless your long-term memory,” I say to Dr. Alten, “because your short-term memory stinks to high heaven.”
Grunt.
“It was magnificent but all wrong. Hot was cold. Blossoms were snow,” I continue.
“Who was the young may-uhn this tahm?” asks Dr. P.
“I asked myself the same question,” I reply.
“Goddamnit. Are you going to play the game, or do we have to listen to that same old fey dream all evening?”
“It might interest y'all to know,” Dr. P says, “that the word fey in Old English described the excitement that presaged day-uth, so I certainly hope the dream isn’t fey, in that sense.”
With this new Old English definition of fey in mind, I consider the options Dr. Alten has just spat at me. He’s dappled my white shirt with bits of soggy peanuty projectiles. I stopped wearing good shirts on Friday evening long ago when I discovered Dr. Alten was a spitter. Looking absently at my mottled shirt sleeve, Dr. Alten opens the bidding with one club, and I continue analyzing my (possibly fey) dream to my captive audience: “It is amazing what memories a breeze can kick up . . .
“My mama inflicted bridge on me when I was four years old. We were living on an army base somewhere in Kentucky I think to be near my father, but I’m not sure we ever saw my father there. I don’t remember, and both my parents are dead. All I have to go on are my own inadequate memories. I was four. I remember the walls were beige and we played bridge on the floor, three-handed bridge because my father was never there.
“When I look back, I see a young grass widow, a pretty, sad-eyed brunette playing with her two young sons on the floor of a simple apartment. She could have been playing with Lincoln Logs or even with those little plastic army men; but when I look more closely, I see she was grooming her sons to be her companions, to play her adult game.
”‘No talking across the table,’ she said. Her schoolmarm’s behest and her stony face have never faded from my memory. ‘Bid, Anthony.’
”‘I don’t know what to bid,’ I whined. I always whined. I feel bad about that even at this point in my life. Little Anthony was a whiny little cry-baby. I can’t deny that.’” I say and bid one heart.
“Exasperated by the incompetence of her little four-year-old, she sighed and asked, ‘how many points do you have?’
”‘That would be talking across the table,’ I said.
”I know I said this because little Anthony, in addition to being quite the little cry-baby, was also an accomplished smart aleck. ‘And, actually, we’re sitting on the floor, so I can’t be talking across the table.’
”Before little Anthony got this out of his mouth, his mama’s cold hand landed smack on his cheek. Smart aleck! she shouted and Where are you going? Get back in here and finish this game. Quitters can’t win, young man. Get back in here, she would scream and scream until little Anthony felt sorry for her and came back. After all, the man she loved loved war more than her. The least little Anthony could do was endure her anger, dry his tears, and learn her game.
”‘Now, if you have more than twelve points you can bid your strongest suit. I bid one club, so you can bid one of anything else,’ she continued.
”‘Can I bid two clubs?’
”‘No, Anthony. If your clubs are very good, you say ‘double’.’
”‘Double.’
”‘It’s your bid, James,’ my mother said.
(“Two diamonds,” says Dr. Colburn.)
“James was six, so he was already a reluctant wiz at bridge. I’m sure his rebellious stage had already started by then. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t irritated.”
(“Pay-uss,” says Dr. P.
”Three clubs," Dr. Alten bids.)
“I learned my first bridge lingo sitting Indian style on the floor of that simple army-base apartment. My four-year-old mind had already accepted alternative meanings for expressions like dummy and rubber and finesse. I learned then that, at least in three-handed bridge, the dummy (my absent father) was a pile of cards on the floor we all wanted but seldom had enough points to get, that a rubber is what you get when you win two games in a row (although I never saw any of the rubbers I won all those years), and finesse is something you usually do with a queen to get a king. And even though statistically it doesn’t work that often, I was especially good at finessing—even at four. Or maybe I was three. There’s just so much I can’t remember.”
“What the hell did all that have to do that with that dumb-ass dream?” Dr. Alten laughs.
“I was just about to ask the same question,” says Dr. P.
“I don’t know. Wait. Yes, I do. I remember once looking out the window while we were playing bridge. It was spring but there was a blizzard outside.”
Dr. P gasps, “Oh, Docta B! The white blossoms from a pear tree!”
“And I said, ‘Look! It’s snowing!’ like a small child might say.”
“Well, there you have it,” says Dr. P and claps his hands, Vanna White style.
“And then I think my brother hit me in the crotch and called me a hoddy-doddy.”
“You should talk to your brother about that time,” says Dr. Colburn in his warm and fuzzy counselor voice. “You really should,” he whispers and reaches over to pat my arm. He’s always patting me and rubbing on me. It drives Dr. P to distraction.
“Y'all probably don’t cay-uh,” Dr. P interrupts and takes Dr. Colburn’s hand off my arm, “but the word crotch, in 1539, originally meant pitchfork, and it was used to mean where the body fo-works,” Dr. P says, pantomiming (not just) a fork in the road.
We stare. Our dumb stare is just part of the routine we’ve been working on for years. Dr. P takes us down an etymological path, we all sit there for a second, wonder what to do with the information, stare dumbly, and then try to pick up where we left off. It’s difficult, but it’s infotainment, and who—in the 90s—doesn’t like to be infotained? Dr. Alten hits the table and curses. Dr. Alten, apparently?
“My brother is dead,” I say to Dr. Colburn. I assume this topic is the destination Dr. P was trying to avoid with his etymological fork in the road.
Dr. P groans. Assumption correct.
“Are we gonna play the game? I bid three club, dammit,” says Dr. Alten.
“Oh. I’m sorry, man.” Dr. Colburn reaches over and puts a comforting hand on my arm again (undeterred by Dr. Alten’s peanut slobber). He’s only been playing bridge with us for a couple of years now, so there is still quite a bit he doesn’t know about us. He took Dr. Gadbetter’s place when Dr. Gadbetter got a job at a larger university up north and then died shortly thereafter.
“It was a long time ago,” I say.
“Play the goddamn game, you nelly ass fudge-packers. I bid three clubs!”
We have all mastered the art of telling stories while playing bridge—except for Dr. Alten, who, not exactly the genteel conversationalist among us, can’t really chat and play at the same time. In fact, he can only do one thing at a time (two things if you count cursing, three if you count becoming drunker and drunker). Since he retired last year, the only art he’s truly perfected is that of becoming drunker and drunker. Could lashing out at everyone around him be considered chatting? I do try to give him the benefit of the doubt.
We play until no one can remember which one of us pussy-ass faggots dealt the last hand; at which point Dr. Colburn drives Dr. Alten home, and Dr. P always helps me clean up and put away the card table. Then, at least in September, Dr. P stays until the threshold of awkwardness has been well worried.
“Oh, look at the tahhhhhm. It is so lay-eet.” He yawns as the door closes behind our bridge opponents. “Puh-ha-yups I should just stay ohhh-vuh.”
“There aren’t any clean linens,” I say. It is just one of my many excuses to get him out of the house. It’s not that I don’t care for Dr. P terribly; I do. There is no one on Earth closer to me. He is the only person who really knows me. He just wants more than I’m able to give him. But he is my dearest friend. It’s unfair that I should be made to disappoint him continually. Why doesn’t he get the message?
He doesn’t get the message because he’s convinced I will eventually come to my senses and fall heels over head in love with him again. He also knows we may both be in the nursing home when it happens, making the probability of either of us getting his heels over his head slight.
Seeing all this in my eyes and through my linen lie, he snips, “I don’t know why you tell people your brotha is day-ud,” and whirls dramatically out the door.
“I’ll see you in the morning at the mall, Dr. P,” I say, coming to the door and hugging the pillow he gave me to my chest. “Thanks for the pillow.”
“Oh all right,” he sighs and disappears into the oaks.
“He’ll be fine,” I say to myself, hugging the pillow.
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I was originally not going to review this I’ll admit but I’ve since had a change of heart so here it is, my opinion and thoughts.
At the start I really did not like this piece. The opening was very chaotic and kind of threw me, not to say I didn’t understand the words, but the lack of cohesiveness prevented me from really starting to sink into it for the first few paragraphs.
Following the opening you go into great detail about the house, I can only believe you intend to use that detail later so I can’t speak on it’s necessity but I do think you could have spread it out over a period of time instead of all at once as it does distract from what appears to be the actual path of the story a bit.(You did however tie in the history of how the house came to be in his possession quite well)
The further I read, the more interested I became in this work, especialy close to the end of what you had posted I was actually enjoying reading it for this alone I’d give you good marks.
As for grammar I didn’t note any glaring or often repeated mistakes and I’m sure any single instance has been beat to death at this point so I’ll instead comment on another issue.
Repetition of words.
It’s not too horrible but you did show a tendency to repeat the same word several times over short periods, unavoidable in the long run, but some of them could probably be changed thus keeping it at least slightly more fresh for the reader when you’re forced to use it the next time instead of seeming like something they’ve seen just a little while before. I’ll list a couple examples.
In the paragraph that mentions the “house-girl” you have a sentence near the end containing the word “I” a total of three times, also two sentences in a row started with the word “It”.
These are of course minor things if they can be considered a problem at all in the space my only worry is that it can start to add up over a longer work sometimes to the point of even a casual reader taking note of it.
The last point of improvement I might recomend is seeing if you can shorten some of the longer sentences you have.
On the good side the piece is engaging, a considerable feat given the amount here, which is very important for the start of a work.
Your characters are believable enough and ones that even people who don’t share their views can probably find points to associate with.
Overall quite good, I wish you the best.
Like the adult children line
Love the hypocritical historical preservation society
mixing of broken limbs was clever
translating drawl to high society was genius-consider adding more please
spectacular eye for detail and painting a picture
yes indeed, men can be as moody as women! They just tend to hide it better
if not constipated in body, certainly in mind, then most men are
some anal needle-nosed little man
getting so technical about the game draws away from the plot a bit, but I suppose it’s necessary to add to this piece’s centerpiece-a long-standing tradition
like the dumb stare routine
like it or not, crude as it may be, cussing is communicating
the subject matter is not my cup of tea, a bit too high-brow for a Neanderthal such as myself, still there’s no denying talent when you read it. The chemistry between your main characters in undeniable, unmistakable, and unforgettable-the odd couple pickled on mint juleps
LETTER
Very well done.
“deals” -> funny :D
“readers who read” – mmm, you could say “enjoy” instead of “read”.
Wait, you didn’t sign it! ;)
CHAPTER ONE
The opening dream is confusing, but obviously intentionally so. It’s short enough to get away with it I think, but honestly I didn’t enjoy it. :( If it didn’t come back later and seem to be important, I’d say cut it. Maybe it could use some extra attention.
“♠♠♠” – nice touch. :)
Now it gets really good.
“Why… ...rhyme?” -> Ha!
What? A Victorian lit major who doesn’t like poetry
“childish, adult children” I don’t think you need that comma.
““kept” in “pristine” condition” -> why not just quote the whole phrase?
““rotten” ” -> why’s that in quotes? Surely that’s not from the letter?
“(human and arborous)” nice! :)
”...forgotten its name. Never mind.” – I’d cut the “Never mind.”
I was glad when you explained what “eee-ahh, eee-ahh, eee-ahh” was all about.
“follow suit” Hehe :)
Dr. P’s final comment makes a nice hook to entice the reader to continue to the next chapter.
Very nice work. You have a good sense of humour, realistic characters, smooth dialogue, and excellent grammar, punctuation, etc. I particularly enjoyed Dr. P’s informative etymological tidbits. I can tell you are a philologist. :)
Best of luck. I’d love to read the whole thing. :)
Something I did not pick up before, maybe because the format is clearer with no distraction, is how much the game is a metaphor for their relationship, full of innuendo and frustration.
Also, Dr Alten is coming across much better as the foil.
It feels like you’ve performed a few tweaks, though without the older draft I can’t be sure.
In addition, the query letter seems a little tighter and more urgent, or inviting, something changed for the better.
I don’t have much to add about the actual writing at this point. The book is what it is and your craft is what it is at this stage of your life. Hopefully you can get this published and move on to the next project. If the rest of the novel is at the same level of this first chapter someone is going to pick it up. Then it will all be up to how well you have led the reader to care about the two of them.
I have read this chapter before, and I absolutely love it. I love Dr. B’s constant bantering. The colorful accents mixed with the wonderful narrative make this a very enjoyable read. I think this should be a shoe in with the agents, and I wish you the best of luck. You have a wonderful way with detail in your descriptions that just brings the reader right into your world. You make the reader feel as though they are sitting at that bridge table right along with the cast. Once again, I wish you all of the best with this piece.
From the start it felt like I was in the story with your character. As close as it is to fall here in the US, your imagery in the story provoked instant memories of cooling weather and the spice of dying leaves. I was transported.
Each one of your characters is an individual. Each one has been expertly introduced. I was going to put off reading this until I had a little more time but by page three I was hooked. I’ve read through it twice now and both times more and more detail has come out. You’re got definite talent.
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