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Plague Bringer:
Sorry that I didn't respond sooner.
What I can say is that I like the fact that you are open to critique, and willing to revise, to please not only your "readers" or "editors", but also yourself. From experience, I can say that I wasn't really worth a damn as a writer until I was willing to edit. The best advice I ever got was: Edit. Then edit again. Then take a walk, or have a cup of coffee, and edit some more. Then, prepare to begin revision.
As Isak Dinesin said: "I write a little every day, without hope, without despair."
Will provide a detailed critique today or tomorrow. Good luck. Never stop. Save it all. Buy a filing cabinet (the cheapest one you can get, like $5 at a garage sale; don't run out and get one, just wait a year or twelve, and when you see a screaming bargain, buy it). File every bit of information you can find on every subject that inspires or angers you. If you submit stuff for publication, drop it in the mail and work on something else. If it sells, great. If not, who cares? You are already working on other stuff, and hopefully you are better than you were when you wrote that rejected stuff. It took Ursula K. LeGuin ten years to break in. Get every book of interviews with writers that you respect that your library has or can get for you, and read them diligently, then promptly forget everything they said. Be wary of bad advice. I remember reading some writer who said he never revised, and thought that that meant that if I was really a genius, I would never have to edit. That bad advice took me about 25 years to unlearn.
Gotta run. Will read both chapters very soon. Cheers.
Edit:
Running commentary, as I notice things. These remarks in no way speak to the energy, power or theme of the piece, and at this point are largely editorial changes that I would make, if I was proofing it for myself, or copy-editing the piece for another writer. As such, they are middling, and I hesitate to mention them, but it's a good place to start a larger, more-informed critique.
1) I find that I usually need about one third as many commas as I think I need. I would take the one out of the first sentence, and don't stop there.
2) six-fifty
3) I will allow artistic license if you really prefer cracking to crackling (leaves).
4) I would personally say, "below freezing", because zero means metric, and it takes an American out of the story ever so briefly (even if it helps him to locate the story in space and time: someplace where they use the metric system, e.g., the future, Europe, everywhere but here). I can see my breath when it's about forty degrees Fahrenheit, because it's more dependent on humidity and pressure than just temperature alone, iirc (high school science was a long while ago). Anyways, thinking about an exact number made me do all of this science in my head, when I really want to read the story.
5) I had to read the third sentence twice. I would either add another verb, or just put "blew" in the second clause, as well as the first.
6) The next sentence, about the willows, is nicely meandering, but then the ending is rushed. Instead of "that", you might try a comma, then "which stood...", and continue with the view-pause-view-pause-view rhythm of your sentence. You had a sweet thing going, but your sentence doesn't end like the thing it's describing. You jump out too early. Or, alternatively, lose the "framed nicely" bit altogether. I would personally keep it. You just need to really stick the landing with a sentence like that. It's more of a five-clause thing, and the reader needs another breath before taking in another bit of description. Sometimes you can ladle it on. Sometimes you need to either spoon-feed it, or lose it altogether. (That's what that slush pile is for: if you love the juicy bit, write it down and save it. But if it doesn't advance the story, consider cutting it.) Also note that whereas before I told you to take away commas, I am now demanding that you add one. Ah, the capriciousness of another person's taste.
7) Two similar clauses in a row: "of the veranda of the giant Victorian house" followed by a dissimilar one. I would make the whole thing smoother by just replacing that second "the" with "a", or, after that meandering walk across the grounds, take pity on the poor reader, and give him two short declarative sentences, Ernest Hemingway-style. The clause "from the sidewalk" is on the wrong side of the house. You had my mind going down the cobblestone path, and up those front steps, but now you've snapped me back to the sidewalk. Put the sidewalk where it belongs. Connect it to the path.
"Cerulean-colored" should be hyphenated. If you really want to improve the rhythm of that sentence, try getting rid of "-colored paint" and utilize the format you applied to "asparagus green": "descriptor color", e.g. cerulean teal, cerulean aqua,
cerulean blue. One might think cerulean would apply only to "sky" blues, but often a bit of research will show that a favored (or right-sounding) adjective is much more broadly applicable than one would've thought possible.
9) Ah, the old "but you'd have a hard time telling" sentence. I used to love these myself. Set a picture up in the reader's brain, then knock it down and set up another one. But you didn't really knock it down and replace it. You changed what you were saying in mid-sentence - "they were white". OK, the moldings are white. "But you can't tell that, because they look brown". OK, they're brown. How does this advance the story? Now you're just messing with me. A-ha - I should see that the house is not well-maintained. Again, I personally would reverse the order. "The moldings around the doors and windows, once a pristine white, were brown with dust and green with mold." OK, the place used to be nice but something happened. As a writer, I now stay away from "but you couldn't tell" sentences. They jerk the reader around too much. From the reader's point of view: Just tell me how it looks now, and why I should care if it used to look different. Don't take me back and forth in time, and back and forth in space. Move me in one direction at a time, in both time and space, and have a damn good reason for abusing my sense of trust. Or, into the slush pile with ye!
10) "rust-colored" - If ever there was an argument for losing "blank-colored" from that previous sentence, this is it. If you are going to provide so much description, be more precise, and let me know why these things are important. Are they
new rust-colored curtains? Do curtains get rusty? Were they, like the moldings, once much finer? This sentence also is trying to say so many things at once. I would make the whole thing much more foreshadowing just by replacing the word "as" with "if". That would make me want to read the next paragraph. Also, "each" window? Either simply lose that descriptor (which suddenly makes me think about each and every window in the whole house; How can I see that from where I am standing? And, where the hell
am I standing?),
OR, alternatively, add more qualification ("that I could see from the street").
OK, so much far the sentence-by-sentence version. Let's look at the next paragraph.
Alright, I read the next paragraph. My first impression is that you could really flesh this one out. Everyone else? That makes it OK? Who's the little man? He's "evil"? (Hypenate "teddy-bear", when used as part of a multi-part adjective). You "wandered"? But with sinister purpose. You watched "each" window? Simultaneously? Took a few breaths, "then" (instead of "and"). You just made me wait. Don't gloss over the fact. Serve it up.
Example:
I'll never know why I decided to ring his doorbell and run away on that particular day. All those years that my friends had done it, I always thought it was stupid. I don't know if I thought it was mean or anything like that. It just seemed stupid to me. Which is why it seems so unreal that one day I just decided to give it a try. I guess I was bored. Lonely? Mad at the world? Who knows? OK. "Everyone else did it." God, that sounds so lame now.
Leaves were crunching under my feet. I looked down to see that my feet had not waited, and were already shuffling towards those high steps, wandering towards that wide veranda. I peered at the windows, trying to watch each and every one of them, for an evil, beady pair of teddy-bear eyes, and an evil little man. My breathing became heavy as I came to the front steps. It's not as if I believed any of those stories... '
But it's best to be careful,' I thought to myself. I creaked my way up the rickety, old steps to the covered veranda, trying not to make too much noise. When I reached the burgundy front door I just stood there, breathing deeply. The bell was one of those ones you have to crank, a big old brass monster. I reached for it, slowly.
