On fiction: Rendezvous with NECA: if you want something done ...
Ya know the saying. And it appears that I'll have to apply it, which is annoying. I didn't submit writing to the course only to jerk it in self-reviews. But it looks like the only critical eyes that story got so far are my own, so I'll log my impressions.
The good- there's a lot of potential for stuff to go wrong in the characters' worlds. Are those suspended animation capsules really all that reliable? What if at least some of the crew (like Gubarev, or the obsessive-compulsive Dezaki) really are losing it? The bit about what NECA wants to do hints at some suspense, and adds more stakes to the mission. So does Hendrix' comment that really everyone is in it for their own countries, which hints that, if the aliens turn out to be all dead, it will be a scramble for each nation to get as much as it can for itself alone.
So the premise, on its own, seems ok.
The less-good to bad:
There's a lot of jump cutting. First scene, they look at NECA, the alien object they were sent to investigate. Wham, and now we're seeing the characters have some kind of breakfast. Wham, now Hayley studies her menagerie of microbes and Hendrix tells her to be secretive, and we don't even break scene before WHAM captain Chahal tells everyone they have an entrance, conveniently found so as to keep the plot moving.
I've read that jump cuts are ok, and lengthy time spent for transition is bad; also I'm lazy and don't write transitions. But the result is fairly disjointed.
There are two paragraphs where I can't help it and drop into expo-speak. Basically, I figured out no way than to flat out tell the reader, "look, this is NECA, it was discovered in this year, and deemed interesting because a, b, c". And there's another paragraph where I wax poetic on why the perihelion of an orbit is important.
And yet despite the infodump, I still doubt that it's actually clear what the fudge is going on. If I were to put a questionnaire to the reader, of stuff I really want the reader to have understood by this point, would the reader be able to answer correctly?
This is one place where self-reviews, however honest, just can't help. I need an outside perspective here. Because while trying to avoid expospeak (and almost succeeding), I ended up sprinkling clues all over, in a manner that makes disjointed pieces of the puzzle appear before they fit together. The reader needs to notice thing a, and hopefully remember it till way down until thing b, with which a fits, crops up. And meanwhile there's other meaningful details appearing.
Last but not least, there's a lack of character description. Now, in terms of characters themselves, it should be clear that Captain Chahal is the level headed one, Gubarev is paranoid, Dezaki is deferential and self-doubting, Hendrix is that guy who thinks he's funny. Fairly broad strokes, but they're there.
NONE of those characters is my protag, nor even the second most important character (who's David Ballard, btw). These two- Hayley and David- get surprisingly short shrift in characterization. Hayley has about five lines, Ballard similar, and I guess you could glean where I aim them (Hayley is an idealistic scientist, David is a more pragmatic type), but I'm sure it doesn't come across.
Also, except David, none of the characters get a physical description. Nada. Zilch.
Finally, I wonder what the reaction will be to keeping Hayley Evans nameless throughout most of the piece. Her name is revealed way at the end, on a blood sample label. And used very sparingly, only in dialogue.
The human ship itself is also nameless. Even I don't know what to call it at this point. It's always NECA this, NECA that, but I conspired to avoid naming the ship sent by mankind so far. Again, weird, because like the lack of character description, and Hayley's namelessness, it makes stuff hard to follow.
The good- there's a lot of potential for stuff to go wrong in the characters' worlds. Are those suspended animation capsules really all that reliable? What if at least some of the crew (like Gubarev, or the obsessive-compulsive Dezaki) really are losing it? The bit about what NECA wants to do hints at some suspense, and adds more stakes to the mission. So does Hendrix' comment that really everyone is in it for their own countries, which hints that, if the aliens turn out to be all dead, it will be a scramble for each nation to get as much as it can for itself alone.
So the premise, on its own, seems ok.
The less-good to bad:
There's a lot of jump cutting. First scene, they look at NECA, the alien object they were sent to investigate. Wham, and now we're seeing the characters have some kind of breakfast. Wham, now Hayley studies her menagerie of microbes and Hendrix tells her to be secretive, and we don't even break scene before WHAM captain Chahal tells everyone they have an entrance, conveniently found so as to keep the plot moving.
I've read that jump cuts are ok, and lengthy time spent for transition is bad; also I'm lazy and don't write transitions. But the result is fairly disjointed.
There are two paragraphs where I can't help it and drop into expo-speak. Basically, I figured out no way than to flat out tell the reader, "look, this is NECA, it was discovered in this year, and deemed interesting because a, b, c". And there's another paragraph where I wax poetic on why the perihelion of an orbit is important.
And yet despite the infodump, I still doubt that it's actually clear what the fudge is going on. If I were to put a questionnaire to the reader, of stuff I really want the reader to have understood by this point, would the reader be able to answer correctly?
This is one place where self-reviews, however honest, just can't help. I need an outside perspective here. Because while trying to avoid expospeak (and almost succeeding), I ended up sprinkling clues all over, in a manner that makes disjointed pieces of the puzzle appear before they fit together. The reader needs to notice thing a, and hopefully remember it till way down until thing b, with which a fits, crops up. And meanwhile there's other meaningful details appearing.
Last but not least, there's a lack of character description. Now, in terms of characters themselves, it should be clear that Captain Chahal is the level headed one, Gubarev is paranoid, Dezaki is deferential and self-doubting, Hendrix is that guy who thinks he's funny. Fairly broad strokes, but they're there.
NONE of those characters is my protag, nor even the second most important character (who's David Ballard, btw). These two- Hayley and David- get surprisingly short shrift in characterization. Hayley has about five lines, Ballard similar, and I guess you could glean where I aim them (Hayley is an idealistic scientist, David is a more pragmatic type), but I'm sure it doesn't come across.
Also, except David, none of the characters get a physical description. Nada. Zilch.
Finally, I wonder what the reaction will be to keeping Hayley Evans nameless throughout most of the piece. Her name is revealed way at the end, on a blood sample label. And used very sparingly, only in dialogue.
The human ship itself is also nameless. Even I don't know what to call it at this point. It's always NECA this, NECA that, but I conspired to avoid naming the ship sent by mankind so far. Again, weird, because like the lack of character description, and Hayley's namelessness, it makes stuff hard to follow.
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