I had been trying to write this novel for months but I always ended up with a different start. Finally, I've found something which I like and so here it is. The prologue is a bit lengthy, I guess. But I can't make this the chapter-1 since it's totally different from the main setting. But however, I might make it the first chapter and mention it's from past.
The thing is that I haven't bothered to explain everything and kept it vague because it's a sort of mystery and would be answered somewhere in the middle of the novel. Also, my main novel will be in first person unlike this prologue.
I am not sure if this prologue stands up to the standard of a prologue but all I know is that this is what I need for the novel, and if not as a prologue then it's surely going to be there as a chapter. Thanks a lot for reviewing in advance, it means a lot. :3
And I'd be interested to know about the sentence structuring. Since I don't speak much of English myself the dialogues might be choppy and weird. Besides that, English isn't my first language so sometimes I commit silly mistakes-feel free to point them. And I'd like to know if the sentence structuring was too disturbing.
Thanks!
Burning in the Skies
Prologue
~*~
Catherine was seething with rage, and the feeling of helplessness crippled her body. If she had her way, she would have singed the men with her stare, and she even tried, but so far, she had tasted only failure. And failure tasted like sour grapes on her tongue.
“I see we haven’t yet reached a mutual decision, Catherine. Is there something I can do to change your mind?” One of the men asked in his raspy tone. He ambled towards Catherine, took her china doll face in his rough, chapped hands and crushed it tightly. Catherine cried in pain and jerked her head backwards to free herself of the man’s powerful hold, but she was unsuccessful.
“You’ve got a pretty face, Cathy. Why would you wanna distort it? Because if you don’t come with us, we are going to make sure it happens,” he said in a mischievous silky voice. His hot Pina Colada breath landed on her ears, making her squirm with disgust. Sure she drank it herself, but somehow Pina Colada on this man’s breath smelled like poison.
It was dark and chilly with the stark sky covering them in its blanket overhead. They were on a street from where Catherine could see her house. She had little memory of how she had ended up there, but when she woke up she had found herself in the company of these men. She had looked all around in frenzy and had spotted her neighbours’, Hockings’ house. She lived on the opposite side of the street, two houses on the right. It calmed her nerve a bit to know that she was in familiar surroundings.
Her hands burned where they had handcuffed her, and she writhed free herself. But it was futile. The men stared at her squeamishly as if she was a wretch. She could say the same for them. Keeling down, she choked sobs even as she tried to come out strong.
They hadn’t tied her legs and she could have risked running away, but she stared owlishly at the band of German shepherds that licked the men’s feet. Even if she ran fast, the dogs would be able to catch and pin her down in Godspeed. She couldn’t even bring herself to picture what would come next.
The man who was doing the talking seemed to be their leader and was a robust and ugly man, with a face so large that it almost seemed artificial. He was also tall and wiry, with a thick brown beard. In comparison to his huge pointed nose, his eyes seemed tiny, as if they had been pushed down the sockets.
He wasn’t her only enemy; there were three of them in total. Two of them had barged inside her house in the middle of the night, throwing away everything which came in their way until they had found her.
Now they would kill her, until…
“I won’t come with you. Ever,” she said in a low voice.
“Ever is a long time, darling,” the leader smiled sickly.
“You’re not in your senses. What you’re proposing is just not possible. Science is not a joke.” She barked as her heart hammered inside her rib cage and her head span in confusion. See, this was something different about her. When she was tortured, she would put forward her most courageous behavior, even if inside her heart was shaking with trepidation.
“I see. You’re ready to decline what Dark Robes has proposed?” The man asked rhetorically. Pouting, he made a disgruntled face, trying to show his reluctance. “We need you, Catherine. Your work in science can help people like you and me. Won’t you want that? Our world needs you,” he continued.
“What our world needs is an honest and true leader. Not someone like Dark Robes,” Catherine spat. Ordinary women would not have dared to speak like this, but she wasn’t ordinary. She was Dr. Catherine Cavanaugh, the pioneering scientist in the field of Genetics. Like scientists, her arrogance was something she carried with her as if it were an internal organ.
“You’ll keep your tone low, and I’ll keep my dogs leashed,” the man smiled woodenly as he fondled the dogs.
Catherine’s eyes traveled over the dogs. Their very sight made her tizzy. They had coats of ebony colour with a tinge of brown and their feral eyes bore right into her face like darts on a board. Looking at them pant and stare her down almost gave her a heart attack.
“Sir, we don’t have much time. Dark Robes would be expecting us and keeping him waiting is not something we can afford,” one of the other two said in a low voice. Their ‘sir’ nodded in agreement, his eyebrows creasing as he thought for a moment.
“We’ll have to take her using force. Drag her to the jeep,” the ‘sir’ ordered. The other two men were fast as thunder light and approached the poor Catherine and dragged her by her legs. She resisted, dropping a kick or two on their faces, but their hold was strong as steel. Her legs chafed against the pebbled road, leaving blue and red scratches, and a burn in her belly.
It’s all over. They’ll either kill me or make me do their dirty work.
She screamed, but not a single door flung open on the street. Everyone was sound asleep.
This was more than she could take. Being handcuffed in the street was bad enough, but now being dragged on the same street where she drove every day to and from work was downright humiliating. But something told her that nobody could see them or hear them. However, she couldn’t take this fact for consolation.
Her thoughts swayed to her daughter, who was sound asleep in their house. She turned her head around and watched her house gazing at her in silence. Wish my house could protect me. What good is this structure when it can’t protect me, she thought, and immediately rebuked herself for being petulant and fantasying such an abnormal thought.
Her heart ached thinking how her daughter would respond on finding herself alone the next morning. Who would take care of her? She couldn’t count on her husband; he had been away for business. There was no one else who would ever check on her and her daughter.
Her life would be tougher than mine. God, what did you do?
They reached the car, a tiny jeep resembling the shape of a matchstick box. It had been deftly parked under a tall thick tree which made it impossible to detect it in the dark. The boss unlocked the door to the back side, and motioned for his men to proceed ahead. Catherine stared wide eyed in horror as she was lifted even higher and thrown inside. She landed on her head and sensed a throbbing pain which threatened to cut her head into pieces.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, summing up courage for the rough future ahead.
God, please help me and my daughter.
~*~
The little girl saw the three men dragging a lady inside an old jeep from the window. It was odd. Who would do such a thing in the middle of the night?
The blood had drained from the girl’s face, and she had almost screamed with horror. Clutching her teddy tight, she pursed her lips. She had to tell her mother about this. Maybe she could help the lady.
The bright tangerine lights on the street fell on her eyes like moonlight, but they were brighter and riled her. Still she couldn't see anyone's face-they were too far for that. After pulling the curtains she whirled around and dashed for her mama’s room. In the process, she knocked something down. She screeched to a halt as she bent down to examine the damage.
It was the photo of her parents. Her father’s green eyes glinted even in the dark, and she lovingly held the photo, stroking it with her tiny hands. The shards of the photo frame lay strewn on the floor. Fear gripped her heart-her mother would scold her and won’t talk to her for days. But she had to go to her mother nonetheless. There was someone in danger and the men looked evil. The thought of the poor lady crying for her rescue scared her more than the fear of being scolded. Her face was laced with sweat, and her heart reached up to her throat as she ran.
On reaching her parents’ room, she switched on the lights. For a moment, the lights hurt her eyes worse than the tangerine street lights, but once her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, she scanned the room. On the bed, there was a tangle of robin blue sheets. However, her mama was not on the bed. The room was a mess-the chest of draws lay open with the under garments lying haphazardly atop each other, the perfume bottles had been knocked down on the floor, filling the air with mélange of scents. The window to the room was open and a wind welcomed itself inside. Her spine tingled.
However, once the smell of the perfumes had settled down, another strong smell entered her nose. Pina Colada. She had seen her parents treating themselves to a swig or two of this drink before in their study. But she was sure it wasn’t her mother who had drunk it. Her mother never drank in the middle of the night. Never
!
“Mama, where are you?” she screamed. Her voice boomed in the room like rockets shooting through a silent sky. No one answered.
With vestige of hope in her heart, she loped to the wash room and forced herself inside. It was empty. The toilet was clean without any trace of an intruder, unlike the bedroom. She shut it behind her, and looked in the room once again. There was no living soul.
“Mama! Please answer me. I’m afraid. Please,” she begged. Nothing but silence welcomed her again, and she felt like screaming to the top of her lungs. Only she didn’t.
At last, she closed her eyes and prayed. Because there was nothing else she could do.
Her mama had gone.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Pfft, I wrote this review already and then Chrome ate it. Nothing is ever as good the second time around
Assuming you mean the dogs and not sheep-herders from Germany, that should be Shepherds.
Perhaps it's the juxtaposition of "chilly" and "blanket", this sentence isn't working for me.
Okay, a couple of general notes:
-I'm not a big fan of prologues, so I'm afraid that I'm already biased against this. It's well written, but I'm having difficulty seeing the POINT of it, which is usually my main issue with prologues. That's not to say I haven't written my fair share of them. I'm assuming this scene will come in important but quite honestly it seems a little disjointed from anything right now.
This might be to do with the two perspectives. I assume the little girl is going to be important later on. But I think that it would benefit from having only one character or the other's point of view. I don't know, just a thought, but I think it would work better that way. But I like them both, and I'm sure you do too, hence why they're both here.
-The pina colada thing gets me, because I wouldn't recognise the smell, I doubt a young girl would, especially permeating from a man's breath into a room over the scent of smashed perfume bottles. Unlikely she could distinguish it quite so easily.
-the first scene, I think you need to decide what emotions Catherine is feeling and stick to them. She's half brave, half terrified, half I-don't-even-know. Just work a little on making this clearer.
But overall, really well written!
Hope I helped, drop me a note if you need anything!
-Stella x
Mia!
I'm here to review for you! So, I'll be reviewing as I read and I'll start off with a few nitpicks, nothing major because you know me, I hate nitpicking every little thing.
I don't think we really need to know what his breath smells like when he's whispering in her ear, you know? The description doesn't match the action. It's kinda like explaining how a rug looks like when a character is actually sitting on the couch.
You have some great description, Mia. Really. However, as you mentioned before, English isn't your first language so you have kinda have some difficulty when it comes to constructing sentences and I can see that you struggle but also that you're improving immensely. What I find is that you often times make the sentence unnecessarily longer than what it needs to be. When you write your description or imagery or really anything besides dialogue, try to see if you can somehow cut it down.
"The dark sky blanketed them as the night grew chilly." <-- Very simple yet moderately powerful description that can give off easy imagery for the readers.
I think 'ever' would work better as 'never' or even 'not ever'.
*Drank it.
----
Overall
Alright, so I understand that you're not quite sure on whether or not this is a prologue. With that said, let's take a look at what a prologue should really accomplish. What a prologue does is give the reader information that will be useful and important in the plot later on in the story. Based on my knowledge, the little girl is going to be our main protagonist and this is something she experienced beforehand and will be an important memory that will add to the plot so yes, this is a prologue and additionally, it provides a hook to enter your story in. That's a bonus!
Alright, character wise, I'm going to agree with most of what Sprite said. Catherine doesn't exactly seem like she's scared and acts a bit more reserved and interested in her surroundings. I think you were too busy trying to explain the setting that you forgot what was important, the emotions. Especially when it comes to scenes such as these. The setting can wait, the setting is easy to write but the emotions are the tricky ones and that's what you should always try to keep your eyes on. Instead of the pretty setting and the explanation of the dark room and the sky, character emotion during the scenes outranks imagery. However, imagery and setting are important as well for they build up the 'atmosphere' so basically, it's like a game of tug-o-war but in my experience, emotion usually always wins. When I write a scene, or actually outline my scene I think in four parts. 1. Character setting. 2. Emotions. 3. Actions. 4. Reactions. Then it repeats.
For setting, I don't overdo it and my maximum is usually around 5-6 sentences for bigger settings. I use the five senses to help me. I don't need to give three touch and two hearing imagery but one of each at the least. Anyway, the way I write is a bit more mechanically than others. You just need to know that you can simplify your setting and work more on emotion and character.
As for your sentence structure, Sprite got to most of it and I will agree on what she said. Though, I want to add that I did enjoy the foreign tongue in this writing because you utilized some different word pairs. "Stark sky" instead of "Bleak dark sky" was a nice change in what I usually see in writing.
Overall, this was a great first prologue and you really had an interesting encounter with the thugs and the talk of the 'other world' and stuff. Made me get all excited to see what was coming and you raised some great conflict and pretty much outlined the main plot here. Girl looses mother, girl will probably get screwed up over her loss and will one day find her mother either dead or alive but will discover the truth nonetheless and that in itself is raising enough mystery and tension. Good job!
I liked it and be sure to let me know if you need help and when you post the next part!
-Pink
Tiger here, I promised and here I am to review your prologue!
I haven't done one of these in a long time, so let's hope the standard's good enough, eh? I'll split the review into five main sections for easier reading. 
PLOT
Okay, so you've said that the plot was intentionally vague. I actually don't find that to be too much of a problem--a good opener needs a good hook and good doses of obscurity can achieve that. I think you handled that rather well, giving us Catherine's feelings and emotions without giving away the plot, and giving us a good idea of how sinister the men were without again, giving away the plot.
What I did have a problem with was little nuances of continuity. At some points, you've written as if you'd forgotten to check what you'd previously written. For example:
Instead of saying she was on a street where she could see her house, it would have made more sense to say 'She recognised that she was [on the street] outside her house' (because she basically is). That is how most people would assess the situation. Just me being nitpicky, though,
Seeing as this is from her POV, I'm not sure she'd describe herself like this.
And the slightly glaring discontinuity:
This is all fine and good in itself, but then it contrasts with her thoughts a few paragraphs later when she thinks:
We've just been told how she had little memory of how she ended up outside, but then we're told that she remembers them coming in and wrecking her house and finding her, which is a pretty big hint. So one of these paragraphs negates the other, and needs to be rewritten or rephrased.
Also, if they had barged into her house at night and thrown around everything, wouldn't that have made a lot of noise? Surely, the little girl would have woken up and been aware that her mother was being abducted? Just something to think about.
And lastly about continuity: if the men barged into her house and threw everything about and didn't seem to care about noise, then why:
a) did the neighbours not wake up?
b) did they not just interrogate her in her home?
c) did they not just kidnap her from there, instead of (apparently) knocking her out and then taking her outside to handcuff and interrogate her?
d) did they care about her loudly she spoke outside, in the street?
LANGUAGE/SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Granted that English isn't your first language, I can understand about the sentence structure/language. I actually think the dialogue is fine, apart from a few clunky words choices:
The first sentence makes the man seem all formal and well-educated, although the stench of his breath made me think at first that he was a common thug. However, in the second sentence he uses the word 'wanna', and combined with 'distort' it doesn't sound right. The latter is too formal and the former is to common, they don't go well together. I suggest using 'want to' instead of 'wanna'.
'Squeamishly' makes the men seem a bit uncomfortable in her presence, I'm not sure that was the word you wanted? And this may be more of a nitpick, but the word 'wretch' has a pitying connotation, and again I'm not sure what you meant by its use here.
I'm not sure the added description was needed with 'owlishly', and I don't think 'Godspeed' is an actual measure of time or should be used as such. Perhaps 'in an instant' or 'instantaneously?'
Unless?
'Senses' seems a bit jarring and out of place here, perhaps 'in your right mind' might fit better?
Should be: joke!' she barked as... and spun. And the lengthily and bolded part: this bit sounds like too much telling and not enough showing. Instead of telling us her courage, you could say 'she barked even as' to show us her courage. Likewise this:
needs showing and not telling to make it believable and let it flow. You mostly do show, but every now and then just remember to watch out for over-telling. Really, the only things wrong language-wise with this piece are words occasionally used in the wrong context, and the aforementioned telling over showing. It's mostly understandable, but some of those misplaced words can occasionally make sentences a bit clunky and jarring.
CATHERINE
At some points we get a good idea of her fear, but not too much of her rage. She seems more interested in taking in the environment, instead of focusing on the man speaking to her. This seems to indicate a lack of fear or emotion towards him, which is strange seeing as she is described as angry and disgusted by him. Also, we don't get a very good idea of her genius. We know she must be smart, because of her work in Genetics, but the language she uses does not reflect that level of intelligence. The words and phrases she uses are a bit clunky, though that's probably less your intention and just a result of language barriers. However, her daughter actually uses more sophisticated words than she does, so perhaps you could change her internal dialogue a bit, and use more sophisticated words in her descriptions.
I do like how towards the end, it is implied that she knows what's coming, where she going, and it ties in well with the vague obscure opening and the idea that all the characters know more than the reader. I don't think we've seen enough of Catherine in this prologue, but I get the sense that she's one of of those characters who is a major, but isn't supposed to have a lot of screen time to themselves. Hopefully her character will be well-rounded by references from other characters later in the story.
LITTLE GIRL
The little girl's language is a lot less clunky than her mother's; in fact, I rather liked it. It felt real and very natural, apart from the fact that she uses language in a very sophisticated way that she probably shouldn't at her (implied) young age. Maybe this is because she is some sort of prodigy or child genius, but that isn't implied, and should be made clearer if true. Otherwise, try mixing up tenses or using less descriptive words, or even writing in a manner that shows she easily loses her train of thought instead of presenting her section in the clear, concise, sophisticated manner in which you did. You did try and some points to make her seem younger, what with the use of 'Mama', 'the lady' and comparisons like 'tangerine street lights', but this is contrasted by words like 'nonetheless', 'mother' (far too formal) and 'melange' amongst others.
But I did completely like the style you used for the girl. I simply feel that her style of description would have better suited her mother, and vice versa.
I get the feeling that this is the real protagonist, and that her mother was trying to protect her? I hope the next chapter proves me right (or miserably wrong).
OVERALL IMPRESSION
I liked this story. I didn't feel that it was too vague, and I'm interested to know who this Dark Robes person is (though perhaps it would have been more mysterious not to name him at all? But that's just opinion). I have a feeling that we're not really going to see Catherine again, but that the little girl will grow up to be the protagonist of our story. She seems rather intelligent in this piece (like her mother) and I can only imagine that the abduction would screw her up enough to make her an interesting character in the future. I also have this feeling that the Hockings are going to raise the girl, if only for the rather specific mentioning of her name. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the next part and finding out what those men wanted from Catherine and what other world they were talking about.
Tiger
P.S. I miss the review page thing. And now I remember how long it takes me to right up a good review.