It’s Thursday 26th August, and from today you can read the 3rd instalment of my work-in-progress The Hunt for the Great Bear.
What I’ll be posting here in these weekly instalments will eventually be the whole of Part One of the book, which has been through a first and second draft. At the moment I’m working on the first draft of Part Two. Once that’s done, I’ll write a second draft, and then most likely do a third draft of the whole book. And my aim is to take into consideration any comments posted here when writing that draft.
For the time being, you can read the third instalment here The Hunt for the Great Bear 3
Also, follow the link below to read an article about a creature that was one of the sources of inspiration for the book.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8321000/8321102.stm
davidcalcutt
Hi David, sorry for not being back for a while. I actually read Part 2 a few days ago but didn’t comment then. I’ll comment on both Part 2 and Part 3 here.
you could cut some of the more introspective passages.
In general I think it’s great, I love the clean writing style and the story is intriguing. I think the pace is quite slow, and if you wanted to up it for purposes of commercial viability
Part 2
I’m not sure about the bit where he pauses in between the village and the graveyard area – it’s a bit unclear why the bit where he is standing is so significant. I think the thing is that the village is not described as having particularly strict or well-defined boundaries (e.g. two great big pillars and a fence) so I didn’t have a good visual sense of what was happening.
“I could see out shanty” – our shanty
I really like the cutting the finger and the dancing ritual. However, is the dancing a bit of an anti climax after the amputation? I think you should swap them around and make the dancing, which has a lot of suspense but turns out not to be real, not dangerous be the build up to the amputation (the dancing being harmless would have lulled him into a false sense of security). Plus the real blood letting is a bigger deal, presumably.
Part 3
‘Push way through with hands’ – do they need gloves? You mention mittens later.
‘Eating our supplies’ – how about ‘eating what we’d brought’? Dunno why. Sounds better.
‘Ice flows’ – I’m pretty sure it’s floes
‘The moon calling us with his bone face and dead man’s voice’ – love it! Maybe point out it is still day time when they see the moon, by noting the blue sky behind the moon, for example.
I wasn’t sure that the provocation about his dad was bad enough, somehow. Is it shameful that he went away? Also, it might be higher stakes if he was thinking something that he really couldn’t share – or else why couldn’t he laugh it off?
When he sees the animal (Fool) maybe give us a sense of the size; rabbit or rhinocerous. I was thinking it was the bear but then thought that he might have mentioned it was huge in that case.
Hope this is useful. As I say, in general it’s really good, working well.
Leila
Excellent and insightful comments, Leila, and they’ll be very, very helpful when I work on a final draft.
Yes, of course it’s “floes”!
Thanks very much indeed for taking such time and trouble.
Be seeing you soon.
David