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Sci-fi novel now available from DC member kyrathaba!
Perry Mowbray:
Reading from thru_18_revised...
Chapter 17
Paragraph 26.2
"He was on his third snifter of brandy of the day" It's probably OK, but the double 'of' didn't read out loud well (to my ears)... 'He was on his third snifter of brandy for the day'?
"No messages since then, though he’d hoped, daily, for one." :-\ 'No messages since then, though each day he'd been disappointed.' I think I'd focus on the 'disappointment' rather than the 'hope'? Just a thought...
"Estimated time remaining is one-hundred ninety-four seconds..." When reading I added an 'and' in there without it being there... also, you don't think it'd be made more human? '3 minutes, 14 seconds'? Or that Mephord has a personal setting on his workstation to round to the quarter? 'about 3 and a quarter seconds'
Paragraph 26.48 "two-hundred eighty-eight minutes" Same question about rounding and humanising. I also read it as 'two-hundred and eighty-eight minutes' but there's no 'and'... should there be (I note that 4wd has already noted that... maybe it's a question about internationalisation)?
Paragraph 26.63 "He arched his eyebrows inquisitively and gave her his best bedside manner expression." Maybe 'He gave her his best bedside manner expression and arched his eyebrows inquisitively.'? Don't know why the former didn't sit | read well for me??
Paragraph 26.65 "She gathered up the ultrasound equipment on its wheeled rack and departed the examination room." You don't think that we'd progressed past trolleys and developed WiFi enabled ultrasound scanners?
Paragraph 26.75
"which had occurred within the mountain almost two days ago" Or 'under', 'beneath'?
"And the signature of a fresh blast of radiation was easily picked out of the notably lower surrounding radiation levels." 'And the signature of a fresh blast of radiation was easily picked out of the notably lower radiation levels in that area.'
Paragraph 26.77
"The crew complement aboard this sole remaining alien vessel was not so large that they could easily afford to lose any crew members." I think the second crew is unnecessary?
"And now, quite possibly, they’d lost two in the space of a few short weeks." This can not be Alien Speak... I don't think they'd even use Earth Days for their own time comparisons??
"They wrestled with the implications, and decided not to send an alarming message via tachyon beam to the mothership." 'They wrestled with the implications, and decided not to send a message via tachyon beam to the mothership.' The alarm is explained later...
Paragraph 26.78 "The ship orbited slowly, scanning vigilantly all around it" I took me a little while to understand what you were meaning here... maybe something like 'onboard sensors searching for unidentified objects' would explain it better? It is explained in the next sentence, but I stumbled here and didn't read the next sentence until I thought it was talking about scanning the earth (which it wasn't).
Paragraph 26.85 "Dr. Eddie Hasser, roboticist Byron Milner, Environmental tech Veronee Houston, and Environmental tech Zuzana Wesley" I think I thought the use of their job descriptions would be unnecessary for the instruction, as if there was name duplication the computer would seek clarification...
4wd:
"Estimated time remaining is one-hundred ninety-four seconds..." When reading I added an 'and' in there without it being there... also, you don't think it'd be made more human? '3 minutes, 14 seconds'? Or that Mephord has a personal setting on his workstation to round to the quarter? 'about 3 and a quarter seconds'-Perry Mowbray (June 29, 2013, 08:53 PM)
--- End quote ---
America doesn't use and in numerical descriptions for whole numbers, (something that was new to me). Come to think of it, without going back through a load of books, I wouldn't be able to tell you if any of the other American writers I read put it in or not - I just automatically skip/insert it. It's only because of the proofreading that I actively try looking for things to query.
(Dammit! Now I gotta go grab a Dean Koontz book and have a look...)
The ship orbited slowly, scanning vigilantly all around it, getting closer to the continent called North America with each passing hour.
--- End quote ---
The ship orbited slowly, getting closer to the continent called North America with each passing hour, [close proximity|near space] defensive scanning protocols in [operation|place|effect|?].
kyrathaba:
Edits implemented and uploaded as thru18_ch17modded.zip
4wd:
I'm about 60% done with this novel which, of course, will end on a cliffhanger...
-kyrathaba (June 29, 2013, 03:04 PM)
--- End quote ---
Oh god! It's not going to be a quadrilogy written at a rate of one per year is it?
That'd be...... evil!
kyrathaba:
^ Well, I started this novel on June 6th, 23 days ago. And I'm 60% done. At that rate, I could be 100% done in another 2.5 weeks. I can easily imagine churning out at least two, if not more books annually.
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