~900
“We should just knock the whole pile down,” Fleta said, staring up at the gleaming dagger.
Jay shook his head. “Do you want to call attention to what we’re doing back here? Or this particular stack of boxes? They’ll forever associate this stack with us, so when they notice the dagger is missing, they’ll automatically think of us.”
“That’s only if they notice the dagger is missing. The place doesn’t look like it does inventory all that often. And, by the time they do notice, we’ll be long gone and back in Trevon.” Fleta argued.
“But not William! I don’t want to dump our bad deeds on him.”
“Jay’s right in that we’ll call unneeded attention to ourselves if we knock it over,” Cabot mused, rubbing his stubbly chin. “However, I don’t see any way that we could obtain it otherwise.”
“Maybe we could ask to borrow a ladder?” Jay suggested weakly.
“That will call just as much attention,” said Cabot, shaking his head.
“Then how will we do it?” Jay circled around the stack as much as he could, trying to look at it from other angles.
“Maybe we could try to lasso it down,” said Fleta, “or maybe hit it down with something?” She started looking around on the ground.
“That might work,” said Cabot, “were any of us good at lassoing things. Jay, you don’t have a secret hidden talent at roping cattle, do you?”
“Of course not. Though, I think Shep might have. Too bad you didn’t bring him, he said, but he started searching the area as well.
“Aha!” Fleta shouted, and proudly held up a long cord originating from some enormous drapes.
Fleta created a pretty large loop and tied it off with a knot. They each took turns trying to get the loop up there, but it never quite made it. The closest they ever came was hitting the box that the dagger stuck out of.
“Maybe we’re doing it wrong,” Jay muttered as they all sat down to rest their weary arms.
There was silence. An idea started to form in Jay’s mind.
“What if,” he began, “we held it like a jump rope, with a person on each end, and tried it that way?”
“There’s no way it would be long enough,” Fleta said doubtfully.
“I’m sure we can find another rope. We’ll tie the two together!”
They scavenged for a second rope, and this time Cabot found one attached to a tire to make a swing. He quickly unhitched it from the tire, and connected it to the curtain cord. The, he and Jay stood at either side of the box pile, trying to swing it up around the dagger. But, there wasn’t enough room for the rope to go all the way to the side, and they couldn’t bring it straight up.
Jay was getting frustrated when Fleta said, “Wait, I know how to fix this!” She dug through a couple boxes, and found a bucket, partially-filled with dried cement. She tied it onto the middle of the rope, then stood on a pile of furniture that wobbled a little as she climbed, bucket in hand.
Jay watched this all with confusion. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going to throw this bucket over the dagger, and then you can pull it down!”
Jay watched her dubiously as she hefted the pail over her head and flung it toward the dagger. It missed, and landed with a crash on the floor. Jay flinched, but Fleta just climbed back down the furniture stack to retrieve it. She tried again and again, missing time after time.
Finally, it made it. The rope hooked onto the dagger’s hilt, the bucket slamming against the sturdy stack. Fleta’s face shone with perspiration and pride. “Okay, now you have to pull it just right,” she said. “Our main goal is to pull it sideways, but if you just pull sideways, the rope will slip off, so you have to pull down as well. I’m not sure what the perfect angle is, but go slowly.
Jay and Cabot pulled and tugged, slowly and carefully, inching the dagger out of its crevice. Eventually, through much goading and persuading, the dagger teetered. One last yank, and it was clattering to the floor, along with the bucket.
As soon as he was sure that the entire pile of boxes wasn’t going to fall down, Cabot rushed to the dagger. He picked it up gingerly, as if it was a child. The blade was so shiny it was almost silver, but it had the melodic hue of gold twining through. The hilt was beknubbled in in sapphires and rubies and emeralds and diamonds. Jay doubted they were real—why would the dagger not be better protected if they were?—but he didn’t tell that to Cabot. He figured that it would be bad Cabot was in possession of the real knife. Or that it wouldn’t matter if the stones were real. No matter the case, Cabot fell for the knife, hook, line, and sinker.
Fleta, too, was transfixed by the knife. So much so, that she didn’t notice there were now four members to their party.
“Fancy the gilded dagger, eh? I would too, but I wouldn’t take what isn’t mine,” the old man said, his bushy white eyebrows pushed down over his narrowed, steely eyes.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,021 Literary Works • 672,740 Reviews
Hi Fortis!
I am going to be honest and say that there isn't much more to be said here. I am going to stay away from nitpicks and all that stuff because you seem to have enough of them, so this will be short.
I feel like I say this for all your reviews, but you have great reviewers already and write very well.This was a pretty good chapter! There wasn't anything that struck me as too much of a challenge in here, and it didn't show much in terms of character, but it was a move forward for the plot. Cabot now has his dagger, although how much longer it will be in his possession we won't know. And we know that some kind of battle is going to be going on soon, for the dagger. I wonder if William is going to be for the group or not, or what the man intends to do to get it back. I like that they all had to work together and put their brains in gear to find a way to solve the problem they had at hand. It wasn't my favourite chapter, but it wasn't exactly lacking in anything either, so I won't say it was a bad one.
I did find the problem a bit... childish though? I know this may not be young adult or anything, but as I read it I will lend towards this having the older reader feel, as well as being good for mature kids. But the problem they faced here feels like something I would be more likely to find in a childrens novel and seemed a bit petty. Their main problem here was that they couldn't reach something and had to tie rope together to bring it down, with a bucket. In comparison to some of the things they have had to do to get this far so far, it seems a bit pale in comparison. I wanted something that would be a great challenge. (I think I mentioned this in the previous review as well.) And if it is not going to be a challenge, just one I can take seriously and even be worried that it might not work.
I thought it was strange that no one noticed the noise. Maybe in the next chapter you will mention that the old man came in due to the racket they were making - which would make sense. But I would also think that Jay would've been on his watch more. Sure, no one came the first time she dropped the bucket, but in all the times she tried there would've been noise and I would be nervous every time if I was doing a stealing job. Especially as it is something that Jay has never done before. Another thing is, I found it a bit odd that William didn't come in with the old man when they heard something and wanted to check in on the kids. Remember, William is on his best guard now, because he knows Jay is a runaway and doesn't want to let the boy escape again.
The last thing, and the only thing I feel pulled to bring up will be Cabot's reaction to finally having the dagger in his hands. We don't yet know why we need it or how long he has wanted it for, or even how he knows about it. But I am sure you have all those answers and can wait. But once he has it in his hands I wanted something more for him... some greater reaction to the seeming 'glory' he is holding in his hands. I wonder what he thinks it has the power to do.
I know this has been short, but there is not a single thing I could say more, except keep working on this!
Deanie x
Hm... yes, these are very important things that I didn't even think of. I'll definitely go through this with these suggestions in mind when I edit. Thank you!
Hello.
Haven't read any previous parts. Just going off what I see here.
Dialogue punctuation error:
Should be a comma.
Onto the dialogue itself.
You have a lot of talking heads. Right now it's just people talking with said tags, the dialogue not all that differentiated, body language completely missing, and a lot of flat statements that don't contribute to characterization or atmosphere.
The reason talking heads are so bad is you lose all body language, which is 55% of communication. Another 38% is tone of voice. Only 7% is actually what words you say, and when you've got dialogue like you have here, you basically end up with only the words that are actually said.
Yes, you use other verbs besides "said", and you use adverbs, but neither of those actually paint a good picture about tone of voice. They don't paint body language at all. Take the line "said doubtfully": you can be doubting in a million different ways, from scorn to dismissal to fear. How you express doubt in a person or an idea is a huge indication of character, and that just one emotion. Other things like how they argue, how they plan, how they appear weak. All of those reveal a bunch of nuance in characters that make those characters people.
It's far better to unpack any emotional shorthand and show how, exactly, characters emote. Then you have individual people, all working differently towards the same goal, and we have honest to goodness dynamics that reveal far more about the character than what words they say ever could. When you're missing so much of communication and how meaning is getting across, it becomes extremely difficult to get a grip on each person as a whole, and you should be doing that level of characterization from start to finish.
Overall, this is more like a script than a novel. Show how the actors in the scene move, and you'll be well on your way to amazing.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
Hi there! Noelle here for another Review Day review!
This whole dialogue here is a bit jumbled. There's a lot about boxes and stacks. Why not shorten it up and just say something like, "Do you want to call attention to what we're doing? If they catch us and realize the dagger is gone we're toast". Obviously that's not how Jay would say it, but you get what I'm saying. Shorten it up a bit. Make it more to the point.
Aw man, they were so close! So close to getting the dagger, going back to Trevon, and going on with life as they know it. Than the old man had to show up. I knew that he would be part of the story later on. Obviously seeing as you took the time to mention him. But how did he get in without Greg or William noticing? Was he stalking them through the entire studio?? o.o Dat's super creepy. Now the creepy man is creepier. Congratulations xD
I didn't really think about this much when I read it, but then I reread it. You switch perspectives here. You've been writing this story in third person limited, telling it from Jay's POV. But these two sentences are in Fleta's POV. They could be in Jay's perspective, but then he would've had to have seen the old man first. Otherwise he wouldn't have known himself that there was someone else there with them.
I'm so glad that the old man is there to stop them. Why? For one, it causes more drama. Their plan has been ruined, or at least now has a bump in it, and things aren't going to be easy. Second, this might be Jay and Fleta's only way to be rid of Cabot. I know that he promised to let them go free when they got back to Trevon, but I don't believe him. Not to mention, I think there's more to this dagger than just the dagger. Why else would he go all the way to Earth for a shiny piece of metal? Maybe the old man is just the person they need to stop Cabot for good. We will see!
Keep writing!
**Noelle**
Timmy here
So they're getting to pull down the dagger, eh? This should be interesting. How they come up with ways of doing it without alarming the dude with the Gameboy thingymabob whateveritwascalled. And I am sure with Cabot along, who always has the best and quietest ideas, it'll turn out great. xD Let's se what we're looking at here. (You know, for a little while there, I wondered if you were going to make it in time, but you did, so yayyy. <3)
Um, this could be just my "personal opinion", but there seems to be something missing in the quotation mark department. hee-hee
This is redundancy. In a different way then what you're used to seeing it associated with, but it is still redundant. You show us her doubt inside her talking there, when she bluntly tells Jay that his idea isn't going to work. Then the narrator add the doubtfully at the end of her tagline, which just reiterates what the reader already knows. You had it done perfectly with the speech. I knew she was seriously doubting Jay's idea. So the "doubtfully", while also being an annoying adverb, is unnecessary and redundant.
O.0 I am wondering now how filled it is. And how big the bucket is. A fifty pound sack of dry concrete isn't actually that big, and probably fits inside a five gallon bucket, so make sure you tell the reader just how full this is. Even with thirty or twenty pounds of dried cement inside, it would be difficult to heave up there.
Okay, now that those little things are past me, I can talk about my real issue with this piece. I am blind. Well, I will not go that far. I do have a visual in the piece, but there are so many things flying around everywhere, and since I don't have a fixed image of the stack of boxes and the room itself, I am just watching all this stuff fly around in the murky picture. It's like there is part of it missing, the foundation of it all, and so I am having a problem seeing things correctly. It isn't that you're not describing the actions well enough (and I think you did a good job on the action parts, actually. the bucket and such), but I don't have the roots of the description tied down, and I just don't have them. Before the dagger topples down to the ground, I had no image of where it was, how big the box was it lied inside, what was in the box with it, how much it was sticking out, how high it was up there - nothing like that. So this needs to be tweaked and re-looked and re-thought.
Basically, visualize the room in your mind, and find all the points that need to be described. I suppose you can compare it to what my dad always tells us about sweeping: "sweep the corners, and let the middle take care of itself". No, I am not saying you need to sweep your pieces because they're dusty. But writing is similar to that because there are parts you just don't need to describe. Like a pre-loaded image that all you need to do is mention the object and beep-boop, your reader has got it. Like the rope? It's a rope. I got the image. But the room and how its laid out, and the entire grounding roots of the image needed to be expanded, thought about more, and given to us better. And I know a good part of the description of the room was in the previous chapter, and I remember that part being a bit better than this as far as describing the general layout goes. But still not clear enough. To me. Don't necessarily add anything, or make your descriptions longer (don't they say "less is more" somewhere and everywhere?), but make them more precise and where you want them.
This is an example. ^^ You're saying that he is circling around it, trying to see if from different angles... and yet I am not seeing these different angles he is seeing. Let us explore this world from your character's eyes more, and let us see what he sees. If you'd put one more sentence telling about what he saw in the stack, and the different angles (if any) he got from circling around it, the overall image would have been so much better.
Hmm, a set and they don't have a ladder? Seems rather odd, as it is a household object of sorts. I would have expected it to be in the room. Perhaps there is one, but it's beneath a big pile of stuff, and would cause a racket to pull out? I dunno.
Oh, and I just realized that William is still back there. I wonder how far he is away from them? I know he said he didn't want to come any closer, but man, he needs hearing aids if he has no clue to what's going on in front of him. They had to be making quite the racket.
Keep those adverbs in check! You know what to do. ^.^
Missing quotation mark there.
I found that word funneh. xD
O.0 HOW DARE YOU. I knew that old dude was up to no good. Seeeee? I called the shots. Where is my hat and cigar? Oh, fine. Keep them to yourself. But, yes. This was such an evull ending, and I loved it. You did such a wonderful job with that ending, and now I want the next part now. >.< Because this guy seems to know more then what the normal American dumb-dumb they've run into. The guy that showed them around seemed rather oblivious and didn't seem to care about anything save for his Gameboy thingy. This guy seems much more dangerous. That, and these other four guys come with him? o.0 Someone has back-up. oh dear.
I am sorry if this review was harsher than usual. You can take it, though. :3 Because you're you. Oh, and I didn't have any chicken salad while doing it. Pretty strange, right? O.0 Course I don't have the sass like you do. hee-hee
Keep going. Even if I go through and critique this piece a lot sometimes, you're writing is amazing and I love this book to pieces. I will be so sad when it ends. ;_; Because it is really a joy to read and review. <3
~Darth Timmyjake