Noblesse Oblige

[Muse]

While certainly not my first story, this is one I really enjoy writing. It's way too long to post up in one installment (going on nine thousand words and it's only halfway done. XD) so, if anyone wants more, I'll put up the next 'chapter' and so on. ^^

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Noblesse Oblige
Chapter One: Din

This is how my morning started:
    I grumbled out of my dream—a dream in which I had been with Lucy, the girl that lived just down the street with the pretty blonde tresses—and woke up to a face, inches from mine, that definitely didn’t belong to Lucy. I kept my dignity—what little was left of it at the time—and withheld a scream, replacing it instead with a seething glare. In my tired and dazed state, the glare may have turned out to look something like a squint, maybe even a wink.
    The face didn’t respond as I hoped it would, which was backing off and leaving me to my sleep. Instead, its features pulled into a smile, the most horrible smile I have ever seen. That smile should have been my first clue that my life was about to take a horrific turn for the worse, but I was too drowsy to pay attention to any such foreshadowing detail.
    “You are Conan,â€

 

[holloway]

Heh, nob-less.

But no, to be serious. This needs some work on it but is actually extremely good by this category's standards. Whilst you have a good grasp of spelling, your grammar needs work. Your paragraphs are quite poorly spaced, and in some cases not actually paragraphs. You also seem to be stumbling with commas and full stops- the flow at the minute is not correct and, whilst commas are not fatal, there are some parts with unnecessary full stops that break the story. Your key issue is dialogue spacing to be honest- line break at the end of each line of dialogue, miss a line after each paragraph.

Finally, he stopped at the stall of the best horse in the stable, a fiery brown thorough-bred named Artemis. It was my turn to smirk. Artemis was my horse.

This was the biggest offender. After stable you should really have a semi colon to indicate a description, again after smirk a semicolon. I would advise you give a quick glance to this, which should refresh you of semi-colon and paragraph usage.

Nitpick wise, names are a little issue. The title of the story suggested a clever usage of names (I'm grasping from the last line of dialogue that the payment will come with responsibility) Din and Conan just do not work against Lucy, Parker and Artemis. If Din is as mysterious as you have hinted at, it could work as a nickname or pseudonym but Conan has been destroyed by Schwarzenegger in my mind. Try something a bit more fitting- perhaps with a hidden meaning. Even Harry Potter used simple meanings to great effect, eg: Severus for a cold character.

Generally, though, this was well written. Whilst I'm not a fantasy novel fan, this is quite interesting and some of your turns of phrase are quite professional.

 

[Muse]

Yeah, I've always been an addict to commas. If anything, I'm rarely guilty of using them too little. XD

About the sentence you picked, I can agree with putting in the second semi-colon. I think the only reason I didn't before is because I've heard that putting in too many semi-colons is just as bad as leaving them out and that they can be overused. I'm not sure about the first semi-colon, though. The description of Artemis isn't really an independent clause, so...If anything it's an appositive, I think.

Which set of names did you not like? Conan and Din? I thought it would be the other way around, with people not really liking the other names! The funny thing is that I didn't even know about Conan the Barbarian until you mentioned Schwarzenegger. XD As much as I like the name, the Conan Wikipedia article is making me think I should change his name, at least. Din's name, on the other hand...If a better one comes around, I'll change it. Until then...It's stuck. He refuses to let go of it. And something tells me that you're really going to hate the name of the next character introduced. XD

Thanks for the critique! I'm going to read through it again tonight and see if I can't chisel away at the pacing, line breaks, and the rest of it. Oh, and when you said line breaks in dialogue...Did you mean make a new paragraph for every line of dialogue, regardless of the speaker or the contents of the parent paragraph? Really? If so, I'm cussing out my English teacher tomorrow. D<

 

[holloway]

Nono, I meant line spacing as such:

SO HE TOUCHED ME YAYAYAYAYAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. JIM TURNED TO ME
"How are you?" he asked, "have you seen my pen?"
"Not quite" I replied
"How dreadful. Quite why you would steal it is beyond me hohiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii"
"Yeah"
I turned to him and patted his arm. going to read through it again tonight and see if I can't chisel away at the pacing, line breaks, and the rest of it. Oh, and when you said line breaks in dialogue...Did you mean make a new paragraph for every line of dialogue, regardless of the speaker or the contents of the parent paragraph? Really? If so, I'm cussing out my English teacher tomorrow. D<